The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Read online

  “Mind if I attend? You might need some muscle.”

  62

  So now I have to tell you about Stella.

  We met in an elevator. She said, “I’m Stella, but of course you already know that.” She said the same thing when she met Susannah—and for all I know, says it to everyone she meets.

  And most of them would in fact know she is Stella because they see her every day on television. She’s Channel 17’s Roving Reporter.

  I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I came to know her intimately. Literally. She seduced me. I offered only token resistance.

  She may possess great reportorial skills, but we all know why she does all the “stand-ups” for Channel 17. She is gorgeous.

  Our brief affair came to a sudden end when one of her stand-ups announced that a murder victim “was someone Hubert Schuze had a longstanding grudge against. Schuze was at a party in an apartment near the victim’s residence. He left the party shortly before a gunshot was heard and returned covered with blood.”

  It was all a misunderstanding, of course—it always is—and she apologized. So we parted on good terms.

  That may explain why she agreed to run the Tompiro story. Or maybe she would have run it just for the news value. It was about my “coming into possession” (a carefully chosen weasel phrase) of an intact Tompiro pot.

  She stood in front of Spirits in Clay, the pot in one hand, a microphone in the other.

  Charles Webbe stood behind the cameraman. Hard to attract a criminal with an FBI agent in plain sight.

  After the camera was off, Stella handed the pot to Dotty Edwards. Donald handed me $30,000. I had specified cash. I handed $5,000 of that to Private Wills and $6,000 to Susannah Inchaustigui.

  Charles watched. No one in the small crowd tried to make a money grab.

  Susannah said, “I can’t accept this, Hubie.”

  “Sure you can. It’s your twenty percent.”

  “But the wager was for twenty percent of the pot you found on our first visit to the range. I had nothing to do with you finding this one.”

  “You had everything to do with me being able to keep it. If you hadn’t concocted that story and sent Glad, I never could have gotten out of there with the pot.”

  “I could use the money for this fall’s tuition, but it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Okay, how about you sell me the O’Keeffe for six thousand?”

  “Deal.”

  The next person in my cash line was Thelma Wilkes, whom I’d called on the pretense that she might enjoy seeing Stella’s stand-up.

  I talked to her discreetly off to one side.

  “I’m sorry, Thelma. Carl never did get that fifty thousand.”

  “Yeah, I know that now.”

  “How much do you need for your medical bills?”

  “Somewhere around four thousand. You don’t need a clerk, do you? I have some bad days when I wouldn’t be able to come in, and I’m not sure how long I can stay in your building without smoking—”

  “Thelma, I don’t need a clerk.”

  She looked down.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  She did so without looking up. I placed a stack of fifty hundred-dollar bills in her hand. “This is for your medical bills. Plus another thousand to enroll in a quit-smoking program or buy a lifetime supply of Nicorette.”

  “Thank you. I don’t like taking charity, but I need the money.”

  “It’s not charity. Think of it as money from Carl. He’s the one who sent me looking for another Tompiro. Without him, I wouldn’t have this to pass along to you.”

  The search had taken a winding path, but he was the one who prompted me to take the first step.

  “I feel better now about trusting you,” she said before she left.

  63

  Jack Haggard probably enjoyed looking at Stella Ramsey as much as do the other men in Albuquerque.

  Of course, his interest in her most recent stand-up spurred something more than lust.

  I’d agreed several years ago to be a decoy. Whit furnished me a Kevlar vest for the occasion, but that didn’t make standing behind my counter staring down the barrel of a gun any less stressful. We had to do it that way because I needed to extract a confession before Whit stepped out from behind my workshop door to make the arrest.

  This time we didn’t need a confession. And not only did I not play decoy, I wasn’t even in Old Town when Haggard showed up to rob Spirits in Clay for the third time.

  Which turned out not to be a charm.

  The first counterman he robbed was Gladwyn Farthing.

  The second was Hubert Schuze.

  The third was Whit Fletcher.

  Who got the drop on Haggard.

  Whit didn’t have to reach into his jacket for his gun. It was in his hand just out of sight below the counter.

  He cuffed Haggard and took him to a motel room Haggard was renting. He collected some stolen artifacts and a good deal of cash. The artifacts were confiscated as evidence. The cash was confiscated as evidence.

  Some of it.

  Most of it ended up in Whit’s pocket. He never told me how much. He did give me a cut, even though it was not the original money we were looking for and he could have kept it all.

  The other money had paid most of my bills and I still had the shards to assemble into a collector’s item. So since this was money I hadn’t expected, I donated it to a fund that assists the remaining survivors of the Bataan Death March.

  You may remember me mentioning a bookstore here in Old Town called Treasure House Books and Gifts. The building is owned by Jim Hoffsis, a veteran. His son, John Hoffsis, runs the store. The two of them have been participating in the Annual Memorial March for years. They invite me to join them each year. I think I’ll take them up on the offer next time.

  I haven’t yet decided if I’ll stay on the trail the entire walk.

  64

  I didn’t go back to Old Town after Haggard’s arrest.

  Sharice and I were in bed. I saw no reason to leave.

  She had let Benz back in from the balcony, and he was draped over most of the end of the bed.

  “A wonderful thing has happened to me,” she said.

  “Yeah. It was great for me too.”

  She giggled and poked me. “I just realized I no longer care that I don’t have a left breast.”

  “I never did care.”

  “I know that. But despite all the things I did to change my life and my attitude, I did care. Not so much that it was an obsession. But it bothered me. And now it doesn’t, thanks to you.”

  “Just because I don’t care, you don’t care?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Shoot. I’m still clueless.

  “You gave me that book you got from Ms. Po. A line in one of the poems is, ‘You only lose what you cling to.’ After I found you, I stopped clinging to that breast. So it’s no longer lost.”

  She scooted closer to me. “Did you ever live with any of those girlfriends you told me about?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was waiting for that special someone.”

  Not exactly true, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment by saying none of them were interested.

  “Would that special someone be me?”

  “You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t already know.”

  She thrust up her arms and yelled, “Yes!”

  Then she rolled over on top of me and kissed me.

  When my heart rate returned to normal, I said, “Not that anything could dissuade me from moving in, but are you done with your one-at-a-time list?”

  She shook her head. “There’s one more thing on it. And it isn’t nearly as dramatic as the others. In fact, it isn’t about me. It’s about
my father. But now is not the time. There is one thing I want to ask about.”

  “Which is?”

  “Your relationship with Susannah.”

  “We’re friends, Sharice. I love that girl, but not romantically. She’s like a niece, a baby sister, a friend and a partner in crime all rolled into one. But she is not and never has been a girlfriend. You are ma petite amie.”

  I got out of bed and traipsed into the living room. Why is it that traipsed springs to mind when we are naked?

  I traipsed back and handed her a small package.

  She unwrapped The Gospel According to Coco Chanel. “This is great.”

  “I couldn’t afford one of her dresses, so I bought you a book about her instead.”

  I handed her a larger package.

  She tore off the paper. “A Georgia O’Keeffe knock-off. Spectacular. I’ll never be able to afford a real one, and I think prints are tacky. This will look great. I know exactly where I’ll hang it.”

  She started to kiss me again and stopped. “Why the sneaky grin?”

  “It’s not a knock-off. It’s a genuine O’Keeffe.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “She didn’t quite finish it. She never signed it. And it has a tear in it that you can hardly see now that it’s framed. But it is a genuine O’Keeffe.”

  “I should have known it was real. Look at that cliff. It does more than just picture a piece of geology. It reminds you how you feel when you’re in those lonely wild places.”

  “I guess that’s what O’Keeffe meant when she said, ‘I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.’”

  “I’ll treasure this painting forever.”

  “Good, because you’ll have to keep it. Its provenance is a bit dodgy.”

  She laughed. “Judging from the stuff in the newspaper, so is yours. I guess I’ll have to keep you too.”

  Acknowledgments

  Georgia O’Keeffe taught at West Texas State Normal College from 1916 to 1918. My tenure as the academic vice president of that institution—renamed West Texas State University—coincided with the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding. I decided we should ask O’Keeffe to grant us the right to make prints of a painting she had done while teaching there and allow us to sell those prints to fund scholarships.

  I gave the task of approaching Ms. O’Keeffe to my wife, whose charm and grace were best suited to the task. And it helped that she is also an artist and an art historian. O’Keeffe granted her request. So Georgia O’Keeffe is the first person I want to acknowledge. For helping fund scholarships, for inspiring this book and—most important—for her hauntingly beautiful paintings of New Mexico.

  The second person I wish to acknowledge is my wife, Lai. For everything.

  Thanks to my daughter, Claire, and my sister, Pat, for reading the manuscript. Thanks also to the non-family beta readers who could have more easily said no. That group includes Ofélia Nikolova, who not only makes excellent substantive suggestions but also catches typos in all the languages employed. She is personally acquainted with every diacritical mark and knows which way they slant. Stephanie Raffel of Sandia Park, New Mexico, read the manuscript with her usual enthusiasm, and her experience as a Spanish teacher and margarita drinker were both helpful. Tom Lake, archaeologist, is not responsible for any errors in Hubie’s statements about the discipline, especially the fact that Hubie uses shard, which all self-respecting anthropologists know should be sherd or, even better, potsherd. Maybe Hubie uses the nonprofessional term as a jab at the program that expelled him. Even I don’t completely understand him. Tom is not only an excellent archaeologist, he is also an expert on New Mexico, and most summers will find him there with his students. He allows them to take time out from doing archaeology things in order to do other things such as visit Old Town and Treasure House Books. Since most of his students are from New York, a trip to New Mexico must be an eye-opening experience.

  I also benefited from the suggestions of Lisa Airey, author of the excellent Touching the Moon. I loved that book, even though it’s in a genre I rarely read. Andy and Carolyn Anderson of Questa, New Mexico, have been with me from the start of this series and, like my other readers, are friends as well. Jane Robinson of Lake Park, Georgia, is in the group, as is newcomer Barbara M. Lane, MSW LCSW. Barb is also a Diplomate Jungian Analyst, and you can make of that what you will.

  As always, I am indebted to my agent triumvirate—Barbara Bitela, Ed Silver and Philip Turner for their support and advice.

  Thanks to my publisher, Open Road, for hiring the talented Peggy Hageman to edit this book. Her insight into the characters and her ability to follow the convoluted plot resulted in changes that make me appear to be an accomplished writer.

  Special thanks to two friends who are, in fact, accomplished writers—Tim Hallinan and Anne Hillerman. They made time in their busy schedules to read the manuscript and write blurbs. Anne and Tim are each a source of reading enjoyment and a reminder of the miles I have to go as a writer.

  About the Author

  J. Michael Orenduff grew up in a house so close to the Rio Grande that he could Frisbee a tortilla into Mexico from his backyard. While studying for an MA at the University of New Mexico, he worked during the summer as a volunteer teacher at one of the nearby pueblos. After receiving a PhD from Tulane University, he became a professor. He went on to serve as president of New Mexico State University.

  Orenduff took early retirement from higher education to write his award-winning Pot Thief murder mysteries, which combine archaeology and philosophy with humor and mystery. Among the author’s many accolades are the Lefty Award for best humorous mystery, the Epic Award for best mystery or suspense ebook, and the New Mexico Book Award for best mystery or suspense fiction. His books have been described by the Baltimore Sun as “funny at a very high intellectual level” and “deliciously delightful,” and by the El Paso Times as “the perfect fusion of murder, mayhem and margaritas.”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by J. Michael Orenduff

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  978-1-5040-2085-5

  Published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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