The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing Read online

  “I’m not. I cannot identify him.”

  “Well, can’t say I’m surprised,” Whit said. “Probably heading to your place to buy one of them expensive pots. From the look of him, he could afford it.” He looked at me in my well-worn jeans and clay-stained shirt and added, “And from the look of you, you could have used it.”

  “I’ve been throwing pots the last two days. I don’t dress up for that. Or for trips to the morgue.“

  “You want to help us roll him over so’s you can see the wound?”

  “No way.”

  “What I figured. You’re the sensitive artistic type.”

  “Making pottery doesn’t make me an artist.”

  “If you say so. But digging it up makes you good money.” He turned to the morgue attendant and said, “You grab the torso. I’ll take the legs.”

  I looked up at the ceiling as they rolled him over.

  “You can look now,” said Whit.

  I was staring at the ceiling. “Why do I have to see the wound?”

  “Makes the ID process complete.”

  “You expect me to ID him by a wound?”

  “I’ll explain it later. But right now the poor guy’s ass is exposed, so do us all a favor and look at the wound so we call roll him back over and put the sheet on him.”

  If my glance at him face-up was at the speed of light, then my peek at his backside must have been at warp speed, whatever that is. The wound was as Whit had described it, a puncture about the diameter of a small screwdriver and surrounded by bruised tissue. I’ll spare you a description of what was south of the wound.

  After they rolled him back over and shut the drawer, Whit and I walked back to the lobby. The morgue guy stayed in the cold room. Whit signed out at the front desk, and we went outside and got in his car. “Reason I had you look at the wound is I figure you might help me out with this. You got one of them encyclopedia minds.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for ‘encyclopedic’.”

  “No. The word I’m looking for is ‘explanation’. See, there was this tourist making a video of the Old Town Plaza, and the guy we just looked at happened to be where the tourist was aiming his phone. So being an honest citizen, he showed it to us. In fact, he even emailed it to us so’s we’d have it on file. Ain’t modern technology great?”

  “Rarely.”

  “What the video shows is this guy walking towards your shop—”

  “Wait! Yesterday you accused me of selling him a shard, and you knew all along he was headed towards my shop, not away from it.”

  “Just normal police procedure, Hubert. Rattle people; see what happens. So back to the video. Like I said, he’s walking toward your shop. Then he shudders and falls face down. Now here’s the weird part. There was no one close enough to have stabbed him. There was people around of course. There was one guy about six feet to his right and another guy about ten feet to his left, and a woman more or less directly behind him but even further back, say fifteen feet. But nobody close enough to drive a screwdriver into him.”

  “Maybe he was shot.”

  “Yeah, my first thought seeing the wound was small caliber, maybe a .22, but the pathologist said there was nothin’ in there and no exit wound either.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe he’d been wounded the day before—fell and landed on a rake or something. He didn’t know how bad the wound was, so he cleaned it up, rubbed on some disinfectant and slapped a bandage on it. Whatever punctured him nicked an artery but didn’t completely pierce it. Then as he was moving around the next day, the weakened nicked wall of the artery suddenly broke, causing him to shudder then fall down and bleed to death.”

  “That ain’t half bad. I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if the lab guys salute it. You want me to take you back to Old Town or downtown.”

  “Downtown, please. I need to start dinner preparations before Sharice gets home.”

  “Ain’t that sweet. You still planning on marrying her, Hubert?”

  “If she’ll ever say yes.”

  “What about her father?”

  “I have no interest in marrying him.”

  “Always the jokester. I met the man, remember? He’s a tough one.”

  Chapter 4

  I walked Geronimo and Benz when I got to the condo.

  Then I washed my hands, put two poblano peppers under the broiler, and chopped up some onions and calabacitas. I’d just removed the poblanos from the oven and peeled their skins (which was the point of blistering them) when Sharice arrived.

  Her lingering hello kiss took my mind off the morgue.

  “Is the Gruet cold?” she asked.

  I pointed to the ice bucket on the coffee table and said, “The coupes are also on ice.”

  We moved to the loveseat and as I poured, she asked about my day.

  “I went to the morgue.”

  “Poor baby. I know how squeamish you are.”

  “It wasn’t so bad this time. In fact, what bothered me most wasn’t seeing another dead guy—it was that he looked familiar.”

  “Lots of people look familiar.”

  “Yeah. But Susannah was kidding me yesterday about having the Jessica Fletcher Syndrome because I happened to walk by a dead guy on a gurney in the Plaza. There was an ambulance, and Whit Fletcher was there.”

  “And he made you go to the morgue today to identify the body.”

  “Right, which I couldn’t because I’d never seen the guy before. But it just seems too Jessica Fletcher-like that he looked familiar.”

  She scooted closer to me and put her hand on my thigh. “You know you have a tendency to overanalyze. If you’d seen the guy when he was alive, you would’ve thought he looked familiar, but you wouldn’t have worried about it. So just because he happened to be dead is no reason to worry about it.”

  She was right of course. I took a sip of the chilled New Mexico champagne and tried to relax. But she was laughing.

  It was contagious and I started giggling. “What’s so funny?”

  “You want to forget about seeing a corpse, right?”

  “I do.”

  “There was a time when I deliberately thought about cadavers to take my mind off something.”

  I shivered. “Really?”

  She nodded. “I was in the throes of my bad reaction to docetaxel, the chemotherapy drug they gave me. I told you it sent me to the ER and then to the ICU for a week with diarrhea, vomiting, trouble breathing, throat swelling, and my lips and mouth covered with painful sores. At first I tried to concentrate on pleasant memories and picture fields of wildflowers in my mind, but it didn’t work. I was sure I was going to die, which made me think of the cadavers I’d worked with.”

  “You worked with cadavers?”

  “Of course. I was in dental school, remember?”

  “You pulled dead people’s teeth?”

  “Root canals. And you know what we liked best about it?”

  “There was something about it you liked?” I was finding this difficult to believe. Especially about the woman I love.

  “Absolutely,” she said with a mischievous grin. “The students liked it because cadavers don’t bleed, don’t feel pain, and don’t complain. The only bad part is they also don’t pay.”

  “So how did thinking about that help you forget the pain you were in?”

  “Because gruesome things occupy the mind more aggressively than pleasant ones.”

  “Is there any evidence for that?”

  She turned her palms up. “I’m not a shrink; I just clean teeth. Did the dead guy have good teeth?”

  “I didn’t see his teeth, but I imagine they were perfect. He probably had both a personal dentist and orthodontist.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Whit told me the guy was we
aring a suit from Emeral Zenia and shoes from Salvador Fergaro, which means he had loads of money.”

  She started laughing again. “Their names are Ermenegildo Zegna and Salvatore Ferragamo, but I can just imagine Whit butchering those names.”

  Sharice is an expert on haute couture. She dropped out of dental school after her mastectomy and took a job as a dental assistant/hygienist hoping to save enough money to pay for reconstructive surgery. She eventually abandoned that idea and used the savings to buy some designer dresses and make a down payment on her condo. Those dresses made her feel a lot better than surgery would have, although I should add that when I tell her that, she reminds me that many women have benefitted from reconstructive surgery, and each woman facing that choice has her own set of circumstances.

  But I love seeing Sharice in those dresses. The only thing better is seeing her out of them.

  She must have been reading my mind because the next things she said was, “I’m going to take a shower. Want to join me?”

  I sprinted to open the terrace door. Benz, the smarter of our two four-legged housemates, hissed at Geronimo when the dog hesitated and then shooed him outside and held him at bay while I closed the door. Benz loves to watch the birds. My only theory for Geronimo’s dislike of the terrace is he shares my acrophobia.

  The routine is obvious—a shared shower then jump in bed and let nature take its course. And it was about to until Sharice whispered something in my ear that caused my nature to take a different course and her to laugh. And she was definitely laughing at me.

  “Well,” I said, sitting up, “what did you expect to happen when you told me that?”

  “I don’t know; I’ve never said that before. But I didn’t think it would incapacitate you.”

  “Only briefly,” I said.

  We chatted for a moment about her startling announcement.

  Then she pushed me back down and sprawled on top of me, and I was right. The incapacity was brief, and nature got back on course.

  Afterward, I realized her theory about gruesome things occupying the mind more aggressively than pleasant ones is wrong. Nothing could have occupied my mind more than our interlude in bed.

  After we reluctantly put on clothes, Sharice let the animals in and played with them while I sautéed the chopped onions and calabacitas, added some garlic and cumin, and then stuffed the mixture into the poblanos. I covered them with Hatch green chile and aged cotija cheese and put the dish in the oven.

  Sharice doesn’t eat red meat. My challenge is to make dishes for her that also taste good to me. I still eat meat—mostly ground beef in the green chile hamburgers at Blake’s and the occasional chorizo breakfast taco—but not when we dine together.

  We decided to keep it simple and dine at the coffee table where the rest of the Gruet was still cold. It paired well with the chiles rellenos, which were inauthentic because they had not been fried in a batter of egg whites and flour, fried food also being on Sharice’s banned food list.

  She asked me if I knew about Edith Warner.

  “Sure. Most people in New Mexico know about her, especially those who are readers. She was the woman at Otowi Crossing.”

  “Does otowi have a meaning or is it just a name?”

  “It’s a Tewa word meaning ‘where the water makes noise’.”

  “So the water made noise because the river was shallow, and that’s why there was a crossing there?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Many times.”

  “Digging for pots?”

  “No. It’s Indian land. Out of bounds.”

  “So why did you go there?”

  “The guy who lived there with Edith was the uncle of the most famous potter in the history of New Mexico, maybe in the history of the whole country. Her name was Maria Martinez, but most people don’t use her last name. If you say you have a pot by Maria, everyone knows who you mean. And they envy you. The cottage Warner lived in and the area around it seem enchanted.”

  “Well, they are in ‘The Land of Enchantment’.”

  “So claim our license plates. I love to walk along the river bank there.”

  “Did you know Edith Warner?”

  “I’m not that old!”

  “You’ll be fifty on May 5th.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. Warner died maybe two decades before I was born. Why are we talking about this?”

  “Because I cleaned her grandson’s teeth today.”

  “Impossible. Edith Warner had no children.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Peggy Pond Church.”

  She frowned. “Let me guess. You looked at the birth and death records in the church Warner attended next to Peggy Pond.”

  After I stopped laughing, I explained that Peggy Pond Church was the person who wrote a biography of Edith Warner. “It’s a great story,” I said. “The title is The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos.”

  “The guy who claimed to be her grandson seemed genuine, Hubie. Native Americans are generally truthful, right?”

  “He was Indian?”

  “San Ildefonso,” she said, “but he told me he never lived on the reservation.”

  “Now it gets interesting. Maria’s uncle was named Tilano, and he was from San Ildefonso. In fact, he was governor of the Pueblo at one point. But he and Edith never had children.”

  “They were a couple?”

  “Seems no one is certain about that. They lived in the same house for years. Church says they were very fond of each other, but that Warner, even though she was younger than him by a couple of decades, seemed to have more of a maternal concern for him than a romantic one.”

  “Lots of marriages are like that. My mom sometimes treated dad like her second child. In a cute way, of course. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t romance.”

  “As I recall, Tilano was close to sixty when he moved in.”

  “People don’t stop having sex just because they get older.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “But people don’t have children in their sixties.”

  “But you just said Warner was younger,” she suggested. Then she looked at me and said, “Men can father children at any age.”

  Which reminded me of her comment in bed which had led to a brief cessation of activity. I suspected she was fishing for further comments from me, but I didn’t make any. I needed more time to process the sweet nothing she had whispered.

  I thought about my own parents. My mother was in her early forties when I was born. My father was a few years older. They seemed to me to have the perfect partnership. Neither one was in charge. His private world was at the University of New Mexico where he taught. Hers was in the various organizations she belonged to and the activities they engaged in, mostly of a civic nature. Our home was run by Consuela Saenz, maid and nanny. It was clean and orderly, and my parents seemed to be living there as permanent guests, like in the old movies they watched featuring Hammett’s Nick and Nora living in a hotel suite. Except Nick and Nora Charles had no children as I recall.

  Consuelo Saenz is now Consuelo Sanchez, having married Emilio Sanchez after she moved out of my parents’ house when I went to college. And they have a daughter, Ninfa, who was born shortly afterwards. Consuela was eighteen when she became my niñera (nanny), thirty six when she married Emilio, and thirty eight when they had Ninfa. They never had another child, and Ninfa—although married for many years—has no children. Consuela’s main wish at this point is to have a grandchild, but it seems unlikely.

  Consuela had serious kidney problems a few years back which worsened to the point that she needed a transplant. I volunteered to be a donor, but tests run on me indicated I was not a suitable donor. Emilio was ruled out as being too old. The perfect donor—not surprisingly—was
Ninfa, Consuela’s own flesh and blood.

  Consuela didn’t like the idea because she feared having only one kidney might make it more difficult for Ninfa to carry a baby full-term. I don’t think there’s any scientific evidence for that, but Consuela relies more on folklore than science.

  I like to joke that although my kidney didn’t match, my wallet did. I’ve paid for health care for Consuela and Emilio ever since my parents died. Knowing they would not allow me to do so without good reason, I told them my parents’ will provided funds for health insurance for them. If you are unhappy about that white lie, then all I can say is perhaps you need to listen harder to your conscience.

  I came out of my brief reverie and said, “There may be some question about whether Warner and Tilano were a couple, but I still doubt that they had a child. That’s not something you can hide.”

  Turns out I was wrong about having children being something you can’t hide.

  Chapter 5

  If you plan to make salsa, you can buy whole tomatoes for about two dollars a pound and dice them up. Or you can buy them already diced for three dollars a pound. The grocery store charges you a buck a pound to do the dicing.

  The economics of coffee is different. Sharice pays ten dollars a pound for unroasted coffee beans instead of eight dollars a pound for the same beans already roasted. They charge her for not roasting them.

  The good thing about those beans is that the aroma of them being roasted is my alarm clock. And I’m in the shower by the time she grinds them, so I avoid the noise of the grinder as well as the howls from Geronimo and the hisses from Benz that the grinder noise elicits.

  The coffee also tastes great.

  The exercise of the previous evening called for something more substantial than a croissant. I made omelets with the Hatch green chile left over from the chiles rellenos. While I toasted a slice of rye bread for Sharice and a corn tortilla for myself, I told her I had a meeting at the university.

  “What’s the meeting about?”

  “Probably not about anything. Academics love to meet. The start of the spring semester is just an excuse.”