The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Page 9

  “Okay,” I said, hoping for the best, “that’s my answer too.”

  It didn’t work. We had a friendly conversation. We smooched a bit more. But she was unwilling to risk sex while the consequences of doing so were uncertain.

  But we’re not only in a new century, we’re in a new millennium. The sexual revolution took place before I was even born. Sex won. Surely Sharice wasn’t intimating that I had to make some sort of commitment before having sex with her. In the first place, I was already committed. In the second place …

  I never got to the second place, because some idiot behind me started honking. A glance into the rearview mirror revealed the silhouette of a vehicle with no lights. Obviously a drunk or a runaway with no brakes—the guy was only a dozen feet behind me. I feared he was so out of control that he might rear-end me at any moment.

  The Bronco began to buck. I looked ahead and saw I’d run onto the shoulder while looking into the mirror.

  I managed to wrestle the Bronco back onto the road just in time to see the stop sign where the dirt road intersected the main highway. Slamming on the brakes catapulted me forward. After a loud crashing sound, I was thrust rearward as the out-of-control no-lights vehicle slammed into me. And had the nerve to keep honking.

  Then I realized it was my own horn, jammed into the honk position by the force of the collision.

  I know full well that after a collision, the drivers of the cars involved are supposed to pull off the road, call the police and wait until an officer arrives.

  I wondered if there were an exception in cases where the person who ran into you might be a crazed druggie. I was about to floor the accelerator and race to the next town, horn blaring, when the strangest thing happened.

  Susannah stepped out of the car that had rammed me.

  21

  We didn’t get back to Albuquerque until six in the morning, so I was not happy when Detective Whit Fletcher banged on my door at eight.

  “You look like hell, Hubert.”

  “It’s Sunday morning, Whit. I normally sleep late on Sundays.”

  “You sleep late every morning. I reckon you musta just got home after spending the night with that colored woman you been dating.”

  “Jeez, Whit. Saying something like that could get you kicked off the force.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Even those liberals on public radio call them women of color.”

  “Woman of color and colored woman are completely different.”

  “Yeah, the words are in a different order. Big deal. I remember when black was an insult. I don’t try too hard to keep up with what’s politically correct. Which I guess makes me the wrong guy to have to tell you the bad news. I’ll just give it to you straight—Carl Wilkes was shot to death yesterday.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know that, Hubert.”

  “Yeah, and you knew it when you arrested me last year.”

  “There was a warrant. I was just doing my duty. But no one is accusing you this time.”

  I know it doesn’t reflect well on my character that my first thought on hearing that Carl was dead was selfish—hoping I wasn’t a suspect. But I had a legitimate reason to be worried. When I’ve been accused of murder—which is less often than Whitey Bulger but more often than the average citizen—it’s always Fletcher who breaks the news.

  In a way, that’s good. He knows I’m not capable of murder, and he’s helped me exonerate myself. Whit and I have also shared a few bucks that we came by in unorthodox ways. Like the time a pot that was evidence in a crime found its way into my shop and we split the sales price. The crime in question was the murder of the pot’s owner, who had no heirs, and Whit figured it was an inefficient use of resources to leave a valuable Anasazi in the evidence locker. He’s otherwise a good cop and cares more about murderers than he does about pot thieves.

  “You aren’t a suspect. You ain’t even a person of interest.” He laughed derisively at the phrase. “What I want is help. You’re the only person we know who knew him. Did he have any enemies you know about, stuff like that?”

  “He never mentioned any enemies.”

  “You talk to him lately?”

  “Yeah. He wanted me to get him a certain kind of pot. I was working on it.”

  “How much was he going to pay for it?”

  “Thirty thousand.”

  He whistled in appreciation. “Maybe you should keep working on getting that pot.”

  “It won’t do me much good now that Carl is dead. He never told me who his buyer was.”

  “’Course not. Probably afraid you might cut out the middleman. But my investigation might turn up the name of the buyer. I could share that information with you for a cut of the proceeds.”

  “Be careful. The buyer might be the murderer.”

  “You’d make a lousy cop, Hubert. If the buyer was gonna kill Wilkes, he would’ve done it after he got the pot.”

  That made sense, of course, but the murder could still be related somehow to the Tompiro pot deal, and that made me nervous.

  After Whit left, my thoughts turned belatedly to Carl’s death. Should I feel guilty that my initial reaction was concern over whether I was a suspect? That I didn’t think to ask about services? That I didn’t know whether he had family?

  In my first lesson with Martin, I directed him to draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then add a dot anywhere away from the line.

  “How many lines can pass through the dot and be parallel to the line?” I asked him.

  Remember, he was fourteen years old. He probably had the rudiments of plane geometry before he dropped out of school, so he knew what parallel meant, but I doubt his seventh-grade geometry teacher dealt with the subtleties of Euclid.

  “Just one,” he said.

  “How did you come to that answer?”

  He looked at the paper rather than at me as he explained. “I imagined a parallel line through the dot. I could see that if you rotate it in either direction it wouldn’t be parallel.”

  He was right, of course. Euclid’s famous Fifth Postulate, the one Martin could see was true, is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. But it cannot be proved. That’s why Euclid called it a postulate—a starting point that you accept as true because it’s so obvious.

  Why am I nattering along about the Fifth Postulate and what has it to do with Carl Wilkes’s death? Well, there is a similar postulate about death. When someone you know dies, you need to do something. That’s just as obvious to me as Euclid’s postulate. And just as impossible to prove.

  What I don’t know is what to do. Send flowers? Light a candle? Make a donation to the deceased’s favorite charity?

  I usually end up doing whatever everyone else is doing because not doing so seems disrespectful. If there’s a funeral, I go. If there’s a memorial service, I go. If there’s a dispersal of ashes, I go. I even attended an event where everyone was required to compose a spontaneous haiku in honor of the dearly departed, and I managed to both come up with a haiku and keep a straight face.

  I’d had two hours of sleep. Thinking about Carl’s murder and death in general was depressing me. I put my CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign on the door and went back to bed.

  22

  Are you still mad at me for causing us to crash?”

  “No. But I’m still mad that you won’t tell me why you were so distracted.”

  “I did tell you.”

  “Saying you were lost in thought is not telling me anything, Hubert. Telling me would be saying what you were thinking about.”

  What I don’t tell Susannah of my own volition, she usually drags out of me. I kind of like when she does that. But I couldn’t tell her about Sharice’s “bombshell” because some things can’t be shared even with your best friend. So being unable to mollify Susannah, I changed the subject and told
her about Carl and my vacillation, both of thought and action.

  She lofted her margarita and said, “To Carl Wilkes.”

  “It’s not a funeral, memorial service or dispersal of ashes,” I said, clinking my glass against hers, “but at least it’s something.”

  “And better than spontaneous haikus. Did you really attend an event like that or did you just make it up?”

  “You can’t make up something like that.”

  I recited one of the poems I remembered:

  A rippling trout stream —

  A rainbow’s lips strike the nymph

  The fisherman smiles

  “Doesn’t sound like funeral material.”

  “The dead guy loved trout fishing.”

  “What was your haiku?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She leaned over and looked under the table. “Just trying to see if your pants are on fire.”

  “Okay, I do remember.”

  A six-foot wood box

  Floating across the river Styx

  Fish therein rejoice

  She frowned. “So in addition to joining me in a toast to a guy I hardly knew, what else are you going to do?”

  “Like I just said, I have no idea.”

  “In one of the Bernie Rhodenbarr books, Bernie’s partner is killed. Bernie says, ‘When your partner is killed, you have to do something about it. Maybe he was not a good partner, and you didn’t like him much, but that doesn’t matter. He was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it.’”

  “That line came from The Maltese Falcon.”

  “Really? Well, it doesn’t matter who said it first. The point is you have to do something about it.”

  “Carl was not my partner.”

  “He was partner enough for you to illegally dig up an old pot on the White Sands Missile Range when there was thirty thousand in it for you. But now that he’s dead, it’s like you hardly knew him. Clink a glass in his name and move on.”

  “He wasn’t my partner, but at least I liked him. Which is more than you can say for Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer. Spade had an affair with Archer’s wife, not a very partnerly thing to do. I wouldn’t have cavorted with Carl’s wife if he had one.”

  “And especially if he didn’t have one.”

  “Right. I’ll do something. I just don’t know what.”

  “Not to sound mercenary, but I guess my twenty percent of that pot died along with Carl.”

  “Maybe not. Whit thinks his investigation may turn up the name of the buyer.”

  “Let me guess—he gets a cut.”

  “Of course. But even after your share and his cut, it’s enough to pay off most of my debts. But first we have to get the pot.”

  I swear it was like she knew I was going to say that, and she already had it all worked out.

  “We can do that next week during the Annual Bataan Death March Memorial.”

  “Shouldn’t that be the Bataan Death March Annual Memorial? Because, thankfully, the Bataan Death March doesn’t happen every year, just the memorial to it.”

  “Are you going to quibble about word order, or do you want to hear the plan?”

  “Is it long and complicated?”

  “Sort of. You want to get a refill first?”

  I said I did. When Angie had us reprovisioned, I said, “The Memorial March is on the wrong end of the range.”

  Susannah pulled a brochure from her backpack. “Not this year. Something to do with top-secret maneuvers involving the F-22A Stealth Fighters at Holloman near the south entrance. So they moved the event farther north for this one year. An omen, right?”

  “Right. But is it a good one or a bad one?”

  “You say you’re an optimist, so let’s assume it’s a good one. The location has changed, but the entrance procedures haven’t. They’re stricter than the Trinity Site event, probably because the participants won’t be going straight in and straight out.”

  “They’ll go in and out crooked?”

  She shook her head. “They’ll go around in circles. One route is twenty-six miles, a marathon. The other route is only fourteen. The routes overlap because the twenty-sixers have to make part of one loop twice and both routes pass not too far from where you buried the pot.”

  “In that case, I’ll choose the fourteen-mile route.”

  “No. We’ll choose the long one, but we won’t actually do it.”

  When I started to question her, she held up a palm and continued. “People who do the twenty-six miles are hardcore. They go first and they don’t lollygag. So it’s easy to fall to the back of the group and eventually be far enough behind that no one notices us leaving the road. We dig up the pot, return to the road and fall in with the fourteen-milers, the twenty-six milers on their second pass or whatever stragglers happen to be there.”

  “What if the officials notice that we started with the twenty-sixers and finished with the fourteeners?”

  “There were over five thousand participants last year. I don’t think they pay any attention to what group you finish in. And even if they do, we can just say you ran out of gas, and I stayed with you out of loyalty.”

  “Swell.”

  “There is one problem though. They search backpacks, handbags and other stuff going in and coming out.”

  “Not a problem,” I said smugly, “I’ll use the museum ploy.”

  “You can make a fake that quickly?”

  “Sure. It won’t need glazing, I won’t need to mix colors and the design is straight lines.”

  23

  The next morning, I asked Glad to watch the shop and not interrupt me. Once my hands are in clay, I like to stick with the job.

  I normally use sheets of clay to make replicas—the ancients didn’t have pottery wheels. But this one wouldn’t have to fool a collector, only an MP at the missile range. So I used the wheel to speed things along. After I’d coaxed the clay into shape, I let the wheel spin slowly to a stop. Then I deformed the sides to efface the factory look the wheel had imparted.

  I mixed the pigment while the pot dried in the kiln set on low. When it was time to decorate, I re-ran my mental movie of the potter to guide me in placing the hatchings.

  It had the wrong sort of clay. It was dried in an electric kiln. It was decorated with commercial pigments rather than natural elements. But to the untrained eye, it looked like the pot I had buried. It would suit my purpose.

  But so what? I wasn’t proud of it.

  O’Keeffe said, “I have always first had a show for myself—and made up my mind—then after that it doesn’t matter to me very much what anyone else says—good or bad.”

  It didn’t matter that the pot would fool an MP. I was not satisfied with it.

  So I decided to do it the ancient way. I gathered some thin shoots from the cottonwood trees in my patio and wove them into an armature. I rolled out sheets of clay and pressed them onto the frame, wetting my fingers to work the seams together. I built a fire in my clay horno and fired the pot as a Tompiro potter would have done.

  I mixed limonite and ochre in a metate. I didn’t have any willow sap, so I used tap water. Given that the water in Albuquerque comes from the aquifer beneath the Rio Grande, it probably has willow sap in it. Not to mention a lot of other things that shouldn’t be in drinking water.

  I tossed the first fake into the plastic garbage pail that was half full of empty pigment jars and shards of pots from recently failed firings. There was also an empty bottle of Gruet in there—sometimes I use champagne while working with pots.

  I wondered if any of the workers at Gruet do just the opposite—use pot while working with champagne. I can’t help it—my mind just works that way.

  I expected to hear that sharp crackling sound fired clay makes upon impact, but all I heard
was shusssh. I’d forgotten that I’d also thrown away an armload of bubble wrap that had protected a pot by the famous Maria of San Ildefonso.

  I had popped a few of the bubbles before discarding the sheets. Why do we do that?

  I’d bought that pot online from a collector in Houston. Tristan did the online part. All I did was give him my credit card number and expiration date.

  Actually, it was the card’s expiration date. None of us knows our personal expiration date. Which is definitely a good thing. Given how I obsess over minor things, knowing the date of my death would likely send me into a neurotic stupor.

  The expense for the Maria—$8,000 for a small pot—was now on my past-due MasterCard.

  I washed up and stepped back to my kitchen to start some vegetarian tacos. I tossed chopped onions and tomatoes into a pan and went to the shop while they sautéed.

  “I’m doing some tacos,” I said to Glad. “You want some lunch?”

  “I just finished. A most delightful woman brought lunch for you. When I told her you were too busy to eat, she insisted I try it, and I did.”

  “And lived to tell about it. That would be Miss Gladys.”

  “Yes. I can’t work out how a woman with such an engaging personality remains unmarried. Especially one who cooks so well.”

  “She was married. She’s a widow.”

  “But she introduced herself as miss.”

  “She was raised in an area where miss is evidently used as a genteel title rather than an indication of marital status. What was the dish?”

  “Bubble and squeak, but she didn’t call it that.”

  “I not surprised she didn’t. What the devil is bubble and squeak?”

  “In England, it’s made from the leftovers of a roast dinner. You panfry the veggies. Cabbage and mash, of course, and maybe peas if those were served. You bake it with the brown sauce from the roast. But Miss Claiborne used cans of something called Veg-All and made her own brown sauce by combining ketchup and Worcestershire. Quite inventive, don’t you think?”

  “Quite.”

  Gladwyn Farthing was turning out to be a godsend. Not only was he paying rent, he was minding the shop and saving me from eating the casseroles.