The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid Page 18

  It wasn’t worth explaining. I asked why Carlos had left town.

  “Wait ‘til you hear this one. Someone had been stealing his firewood. So he carved a plug out of a piece on his woodpile, put some gunpowder in the hole and stuck the plug of wood back in the hole.”

  He hesitated and looked at me. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

  “I’ve heard of people doing that in remote parts of the state.”

  “Yeah? Well this particular piece of booby-trapped wood ended up in the stove of a guy who lived in the same village. It didn’t have much powder in it. I guess the idea was to discourage the thief, not to kill him. But a piece of the log shot into the guys face and left a scar. By the time he reported it, he had started growing a beard to cover it”

  I thought about it. “I don’t get it. Seems like the thief would be the one who would skip town because he might be arrested for stealing wood or just didn’t want to stay once the whole village knew he was a thief. Why would Carlos leave?”

  “It’s illegal to booby-trap anything, Hubert, but I wouldn’t go after him for that, and the Sheriff up there wouldn’t either. A man steals from a neighbor ain’t going to get much police cooperation. The problem for our boy Carlos is the guy the wood blew up on is the biggest, meanest hombre in town, and you wouldn’t want him angry at you.”

  El Bastardo, I immediately thought. Then I remembered he didn’t have a beard.

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  He looked down at his notebook again and said, “Alonso Castillo Maldonado.”

  43

  I figured if Sharice showed up with another stem of yucca blossoms, that would mark us as a couple. Our first tradition.

  Maybe we’d then choose ‘our song’ although I don’t think people do that these days.

  I had served trout and she had served fiddleheads. I didn’t want to risk serving meat in case she didn’t eat it. I took the bus to the co-op and bought the ingredients for my vegetarian chiles rellenos – poblanos, corn, summer squash, onions, fresh oregano, cilantro怅, jalapeños, a fresh vanilla bean and crema Mexicana. I picked up some avocados and a pink grapefruit for the salad and some heavy cream for the dessert of pastel de tres leches.

  Men are not the only one whose hearts can be reached via their stomachs, and I definitely wanted to reach Sharice’s heart. And maybe a few other areas as well.

  The rellenos are simple but time consuming. Roast and peel the poblanos. Remove the stems and seeds. Sauté the corn, squash and onions lightly – they will finish cooking in the oven. Add chopped oregano and a little crema Mexicana and stuff the mixture into the poblanos. Bake then drizzle with a sauce made with cilantro pureed in cream, cumin and the scrapings from a fresh vanilla bean. Top with bits of sweet caramelized jalapeños.

  I had the poblanos ready for the oven and the sauce warm in a pan. The pastel de tres leches was on the counter. The Gruet was in the fridge. The grapefruit had been peeled, sectioned and seeded. Only the avocados remained as they had been at the store. I like to do them at the last minute.

  The plain wood table had a vibrant green silk runner and plates with a red and green chile design I had done for the restaurant I mentioned earlier that was called first Schnitzel then later Chile Schnitzel. With those two names, failure was the only possible outcome.

  She arrived in a v-neck dress of coarse-woven linen, black with geometric patterns. No jewelry at all. Her signature violet lipstick and eye shadow. The yucca stem was in one hand, a small paper bag in the other. She held them both behind my back as we kissed.

  I stepped back to admire her and she twirled.

  “Vera Wang?”

  “Adrianna Papel.”

  “I’ve never heard of her.”

  She canted her head and gave me a sideways look. “You’d never heard of Vera Wang, either, had you?”

  “I thought she was a local Chinese immigrant who worked as a seamstress.”

  She laughed and twirled again, this time into my arms, and we kissed again.

  I resisted the temptation to volunteer to shed my cast.

  I put the rellenos in the oven and opened the Gruet.

  Sharice stripped the yucca blossoms into the bowl.

  “Do you have any sparkling water?” she asked.

  I poured Gruet into the bowl instead.

  “You impetuous devil,” she said.

  Geronimo was making paw prints on the French doors. We joined him outside, and Sharice gave him a doggie treat from the paper bag. It had come from a bakery, not a pet store, and it disappeared before I got a good look at it. I left Geronimo with his new best friend to prepare the avocado and grapefruit drizzled with lemon juice and almond oil.

  I told her about Cactus Truesdell’s tooth story and asked if she thought it could be true.

  “Sure. We had an instructor who used to liven up her classes with what she called ‘tales from the dentistry of old’. For most of history, the dentist’s only job was to pull teeth and make false ones. There was no such thing as a filling or a repair. And there were no anesthetics. The main occupational hazards were getting bitten or punched.”

  “So dentists also made false teeth?”

  “Sometimes they made them, usually carved from ivory taken from hippopotamus teeth or elephant tusks. But sometimes they used actual human teeth.”

  I winced. “Ones they had pulled from a previous client?”

  “No, those would be too rotten and broken. They nroken. Teeded undamaged teeth, so they paid grave robbers to remove teeth from corpses.”

  “Jeez. And I thought contemporary grave robbers were bad. At least they don’t sell parts. Or maybe they do. Should we change the subject?”

  She nodded and then asked what else I had learned down south. We discussed the Lincoln County War at length because, being Canadian, she knew nothing about it other than the names of two of the principals, Billy the Kid and John Chisum.

  “I’ve heard of the Chisum Trail all my life,” she said.

  “There are two of them,” I said, “one named after a Chisholm spelled C-h-i-s-h-o-l-m and one after John Chisum, who was a fascinating character.”

  “How so?”

  “He was in Texas during the Civil War so he was allied with the Confederacy. But he freed all his slaves.”

  “He had to after the war.”

  “He did it on the day the war began. Including one he bought from someone passing through on the way to California because he didn’t like the way her owner was treating her. He sold beef to the Confederacy for feeding the rebel soldiers but kept the Confederate money just long enough to buy more cattle. So he didn’t suffer financial ruin when the war ended because his wealth was in cattle instead of Confederate money.”

  “It sounds like he knew the Confederacy was going to lose right from the beginning. Do his descendants still live in Lincoln County?”

  I smiled at her. “If I didn’t know you were from Canada, I might think you were one of them. He was a handsome man with a delicate small mouth like yours.”

  She laughed. “I suspect his descendents don’t have my coloring.”

  “You’re probably right. He had brown eyes, and yours are a dazzling green.”

  “I meant my skin color.”

  “I suspect all his descendents have your skin color.”

  She paused in thought. “His only children came from the slave women he owned?”

  “They came from his wife. He married the slave he bought from the person going to California. Her name was Jensie. They had two daughters, so none of his descendents are named Chisum.“

  We turned to light chitchat over desert until she said, “Where do you see this going.”

  “Well, I’m thinking maybe a second slice of pastel de tres leches and another glass of Gruet.”

  She gave me an indulgent smile. “I meant us, Hubie.”

  “I like us,” I said.

  “We haven’t been tested,” she said.

  “Do we need a bl
ood test? I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

  She laughed. “I like your sense of humor and your iconoclastic attitude, but…”

  “But what?”

  “This is our third date, and we haven’t been out in public.”

  I pointed down to my cast. “When this thing is off, I plan to show you off all over town.”

  “Some people may not ople maylike that.”

  “I understand that. With all the paranoid feelings about immigrants, some people may object to my dating a Canadian, but I say to them in the lingo of your national sport, go puck yourself.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  I nodded.

  “But you’re not going to acknowledge it.”

  “It doesn’t deserve acknowledging.”

  “I like you a lot, Hubert Schuze.”

  “And I like you a lot, Sharice Clarke.”

  The silk runner was not big enough to cover a Scrabble board, so I cleared the table and brought the board out. She was trouncing me as easily as she did at her house, but I had hope. There was a ‘t’ in a long vertical word, and I had a ‘p’ to put immediately to its left and an ‘o’ and a ‘y’ and some of the other letters required for ‘pterodactyl’. But I never got all the letters I needed. What I did manage to do was spell ‘ptomaine’.

  It was a pyrrhic victory.

  44

  “So Carlos Campos Castillo skipped town to avoid the wrath of Alonso Castillo Maldonado.”

  “Either that,” I said, “or Hector Campos Gomez skipped town to avoid the wrath of Jesus Zaragosa Padilla.”

  “Don’t confuse me,” Susannah said. “I’m going to call Carlos Campos Castillo ‘The Dead Guy’ and Alonso Castillo Maldonado ‘The Hunting Guide’.”

  “We don’t know that Carlos Campos is The Dead Guy.”

  “Maybe not, but he’s the leading candidate. He provides just what we needed to solve the dilemma.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “someone who’s from La Reina which explains why he could have participated with the local Penitentes. And he had already left town for another reason which explains why no one is looking for him.”

  I thought about that for a minute then said, “But the reason he left was because he was afraid The Hunting Guide was going to take revenge on him for the exploding firewood. Given that, why would he come back?”

  “It’s obvious, Hubie. The Hunting Guide must have promised The Dead Guy he wouldn’t harm him, sort of given him amnesty.”

  “Why would The Hunting Guide do that? I met him, remember? He doesn’t look like the sort of guy who forgives and forgets. And the local sheriff described him as the meanest hombre in town. So The Dead Guy must have given The Hunting Guide money, the deed to some property, water rights or something. There had to be a quid pro quo.”

  Her shoulders twitched. “Don’t use that awful phrase. Every time I hear it, I picture Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector.”

  “Okay, I’ll just say they struck a deal. But what was it?”

  “Easy. The Hunting Guide promised not to take revenge. And The Dead Guy promised to re-enact the Crucifixion.”

  “Being crucified is a pretty drastic thing to do just to get The Hunting Guide’s forgiveness.”

  “Not if The Dead Guy was already one of the Penitentes, a member in good standing, so to speak. Maybe he genuinely wanted forgiveness, not just from The Hunting Guide, but from God for all his sins.”

  I had to admit her theory made sense. But that’s all it was – a theory. There was not a single fact to back it up.

  I had the topo map in my lap, but didn’t really need it. By this point, I knew every dune and boulder by both their Christian names and their apellidos.

  We reached the spot from which I had twice been lowered over the cliff. From there, the course I had taken on foot that ended when I fell and sprained my ankle was chosen because it was a straight line to La Reina. A straight line may be the shortest, but it isn’t necessarily drivable. I had walked between boulders and some sturdy junipers.

  So I had to start navigating again at that point because Susannah had to find ground suitable for the truck. I had my head turned looking at Cerro Roto with a protractor in my hand to make a better estimate of the angle when she slammed on the brakes and yelled, “I don’t believe it!”

  I turned in my seat and looked through the windshield at a beat up old Bronco. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.

  “You were right, Hubie. It wasn’t stolen. It was just driven away.”

  We were only two hundred yards away from the rim, but in a small depression.

  “If I had walked this way, I would have avoided spraining my ankle and all the other stuff that happened.”

  “You can’t change fate, Hubie. And you probably wouldn’t want to even if you could. If you hadn’t chipped your tooth, you wouldn’t have seen Sharice until your next regular check-up, and by then she might have met someone else.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “So this is what you thought we would find. This was your hunch.”

  “It was my hunch, but I wasn’t sure we would find it. There’s a lot of open territory up here. We could’ve missed it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  She shut off the truck and walked to the Bronco. It looked unchanged. The keys were in it. I opened the door.

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t touch anything. There could be clues in there.”

  “What kind of clues?”

  “Fingerprints, a thread from a garment, a crumb of food, anything.”

  “Anything is right. It’s over thirty years old. There are probably enough threads in there to weave a blanket and enough food crumbs to feed a rugby team. And how would we find and collect them? We’re not CIS professionals.”

  “That’s CSI. But you’re right, we need real CSI guys to do this. So we’ll have to go back to Albuquerque and report it so they can bring a team out here.”

  “The police are not going to waste time and money sending a CSI team out to the middle of nowhere to investigate… what, illegal parking? There’s no crime here.”

  “There was a murder, Hubert.”

  “Maybe. But the police are not going to buy that. There’s no body.”

  “There is a body. We just don’t know where it is.”

  “And have no way to find out where it is.”

  It was sad to see her deflate. “I guess you’re right. Even if you tell them there was a body back there, they won’t treat it as a murder.” She perked up. “We need to find the body.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe we can figure it out.”

  She agreed to let me drive the Bronco back to Albuquerque but insisted I place Kleenex tissues between my hands and the steering wheel.

  The battery was dead. Susannah used jumper cables from the truck. I heard the familiar rurrer-rurrer-rurrer of the starter motor.

  45

  We stayed on paved roads the next morning until we hit the dirt one that runs to La Reina.

  I tried to convince Susannah to delay the return trip a day or two. My shop had recently been closed so often that people probably thought I was out of business.

  She said there isn’t much to choose from between a store that is out of business and one that just doesn’t have any customers.

  We pulled up in front of El Erupto del Rey just past noon and went in for lunch. Ernesto was not on duty but Baltazar de los ojos was. I ordered the same thing I’d had the first time, green chile stew.

  Susannah’s order was partially in Spanish and bizarre. It took me a minute to figure out why she ordered as she did.

  In keeping with her professed desire to learn some Spanish, she asked me what ‘el erupto del rey’ means.

  “’The King’s belch’ I answered, and she laughed.

  After lunch we drove the short distance to the home of la curandera because I didn’t want to go uphill using c
rutches.

  La Viuda de Cheche Zaragosa Medrano greeted us at the door and told me again in Spanish that Susannah was not welcome because she was a bruja. I explained how that misunderstanding arose. I’m not sure she completely understood the explanation, but she allowed us both to enter.

  I asked her to tell me about Carlos Campos Castillo.

  Being a person of honor, she asked why I wanted to know.

  “Porque creo que está muerto.”

  She crossed herself. Then she told me about Carlos Campos Castillo. I also asked her a few questions about The Hunting Guide.

  Susannah and I sat in the truck afterwards.

  “I really do need to learn Spanish, Hubie. Do you know how hard it is for someone like me to sit there knowing you’re getting valuable information that might solve a murder and not be able to understand a word of it?”

  Given her personality, I did have an idea of how antsy she must have been, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “And why did you say está muerto?” she asked. “Shouldn’t it be es muerto?”

  “I can see why you would think so. Es is normally used for a permanent condition whereas está is used for temporary situations.”

  “Death is about as permanent as it gets, Hubie, so it should be es muerto.”

  She had a point. When you learn a language growing up, the grammar comes naturally. You don’t need rules. You just know what word to use. So how could I explain it? “Está is Linotyp also used when a change has taken place. I would say Susannah es feliz because you are happy by nature. But if you were not normally happy, but something made you temporarily happy, I would say Susannah está feliz.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got it,” she said. “Since death is a change, you say está muerto. So I assume you say es viva for someone who is alive because they haven’t yet changed to dead.”

  Oops. “No, it’s está viva.”

  She stared at me with furrowed brow. “That makes no sense.”

  “Okay,” I said, “forget ser and estar. That’s a complicated lesson for later. What you need to know first is that the Spanish word for ‘ice’ is ‘hielo’, not ‘ojos’.”