The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence

by J. Michael Orenduff

  “We don’t know that Winant was murdered,” said Glover.

  “Of course we do!” screeched Benthrop. “Do you think he went into the freezer and took all his clothes off as a bizarre means of suicide? Whoever killed him must have stripped his clothes off so he’d freeze to death faster.”

  “Then why wouldn’t Winant have put his clothes back on after the killer left him in the freezer?”

  That stumped Benthrop, but not for long. He looked at each of us for suggestions or support, but none was forthcoming. Finally he turned back to Glover. “Maybe he was already dead.”

  “Then why would the killer bother to remove Winant’s clothes?”

  “I don’t know. But someone took his clothes off.”

  “No,” said Carla Glain, “he probably took them off himself.”

  She was speaking from behind the crowd at the door of the freezer, and everyone turned to look at her.

  “It’s called paradoxical undressing,” she said clinically. “Many homeless people who freeze to death have been mistakenly identified as victims of sexual assault because they were found with their clothes off. When your temperature drops down into the mid-eighties, your body tries to save itself by quickly dilating the blood vessels near the body’s surface, and that creates a sensation of extreme heat against the skin. The freezing victim isn’t thinking too clearly anyway, and they strip off their clothes because they feel like their skin is burning.”

  “How do you know about this?” asked Saunders.

  “I work for the Albuquerque chapter of Justice Now, a victim advocacy group. We learned about paradoxical undressing at a conference on homelessness.”

  “You people are all missing the point,” said Benthrop. His brow was damp and there were red splotches on his face. I just hoped he wasn’t about to undress himself paradoxically. “Instead of wasting time trying to figure out exactly how Winant died, we should be getting ready to get out of here.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” asked Saunders.

  “We should all put on the warmest clothing we have and then just march down the mountain together. It may be a long walk, but if we go as a group we can make it.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Glover. “I had to work like a dog just to go two-hundred yards.” He looked around at the group. “Most of you don’t have the strength or stamina to fight through deep snow for an hour, much less for ten or twenty hours or even longer. What do we do when you run out of gas? Leave you in the snow to freeze to death?”

  The mention of freezing to death caused us all to look down again at Winant’s icy corpse.

  “We couldn’t go now, at any rate,” said Saunders. “Going down the mountain at night would be foolhardy. We could slip into a ravine without ever seeing it.”

  “Or be attacked by a pack of wolves,” Carl added.

  “Wolves?” said Benthrop, his voice cracking.

  “It’s possible. They like to hunt in deep snow because it’s harder for their prey to run away from them.”

  Benthrop took a big gulp of his wine then pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “I believe,” said Saunders, “that we must take some measures to protect ourselves in case these two deaths were indeed murders. Do you all agree?”

  Some of us said yes and some of us just nodded, but no one disagreed. We went into the main room, and Saunders started by asking if anyone knew of any connection between Rich and Winant on the grounds that if we knew what they had in common we might be able to figure out why they were killed and who killed them. No one could think of any common denominator, and so far as anyone knew, Rich and Winant had never met before showing up at the Ranch.

  Saunders then guided the conversation to the circumstances surrounding Winant’s death. Glover and Wron had placed Rich’s body in the freezer shortly after noon, and they took the elk out a few minutes later. It was after eight when Maria discovered Winant’s body, so he had to have gone in – or been taken in – sometime within that eight hour span.

  “It couldn’t have happened while we were cooking,” said Betty. “I don’t know exactly when that was, but I think we started around two and finished around six thirty, so it had to be before we started cooking or after we started eating when no one was in the kitchen.”

  “There was a period in there when we were outside gathering juniper berries,” Susannah reminded her.

  “It could have happened then,” Betty agreed.

  “It couldn’t have been while we were eating,” said Teodoro Vasquez, “because that wouldn’t have been long enough for him to freeze to death.”

  “How long does it take?” asked Susannah.

  No one seemed to know, but everyone agreed that you could probably survive in a freezer for two or three hours.

  “But what if he was already half-frozen when he was put in there?” she asked.

  “How would that work?” Glover asked her.

  “Someone could have drugged him, dragged him out into the snow to start freezing, then brought him in the back door and stuck him in the freezer while we were eating the elk.”

  “That seems a little far-fetched,” Glover observed.

  “I’m still not certain it was a murder,” said Vasquez. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Winant seemed sort of strange. Suppose he walked into the freezer, and the door accidentally closed behind him.”

  “Why would he go into the freezer?”

  “Maybe he wanted to say a prayer over Rich’s body. Maybe he wanted some ice for a drink, maybe—”

  “He didn’t drink,” I pointed out.

  “The door didn’t accidentally close,” said Maria. She had a blank expression on her face, her eyes unfocused. “I was so shocked when I saw him that I just now realized something. When I went to open the freezer door, I had to remove the padlock.”

  “The freezer was locked?” Saunders and I said in unison.

  “No. The padlock was inserted into the hole, but it wasn’t pushed down to lock. I just lifted it up and opened the latch.” She turned and looked at us. “Winant might have gone in there voluntarily, but someone else had to hang the padlock in the hole.”

  Vasquez said, “It could still be an accident. Maybe someone walked by, noticed the padlock wasn’t in place, and just hung it in the latch without knowing anyone was inside.”

  There was a longish silence while we thought about that. I wondered if anyone had accidentally trapped Winant in the freezer and, if so, whether we could expect him or her to admit it. Then another thought occurred to me, and I asked Carl Wron and Glover if they had used the ax on the elk, a question that seemed to be from left field and brought some strange looks my way. They said they had managed with the chain saw and didn’t have to resort to the ax. Then I told them I knew when Winant had entered the freezer.

  “Shortly after I first heard the chainsaw, I began to hear some muffled thumps. I thought it was the ax sounding muffled because it was coming from outside, but it must have been Winant banging on the inside of the freezer hoping to be released.”

  “He was in there for eight hours,” Susannah said in a pained voice.

  “And alive,” added Betty.

  “Until right after he took his clothes off,” said Carla.

  A hush fell over the group as everyone pondered how terrifying it must have been to be beating on the thick walls of the freezer as you grew increasingly cold and unable to function, until suddenly your skin began to burn, you stripped off your clothes, then you grew weak and fell and lay there on the floor becoming numb and then passing out.

  “I don’t think this is getting us anywhere,” Saunders said. “I suggest we agree to a set of precautions. First, everyone make sure your doors are locked when you retire for the night. Second, I suggest we have rotating sentries, say on three-hour shifts. It’s now almost nine. The first shift could be Vasquez and myself. We will be here in the main room until midnight. At midnight, Glover and Benthrop will relieve us. At three
in the morning, Schuze and Wron can take over until six, and at that point we can all get up and there will be no further need for sentries.”

  “But what if the killer is one of the sentries?” asked Benthrop.

  “That’s why we have two sentries in each shift.”

  “Well, that’s no good for the person who gets paired with the killer!”

  Glover gave Benthrop a wide smile. “Don’t worry, professor. If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have to wait until we were on sentry duty together.”

  “Uh, one thing,” said Carl. “Some of us may have to be outside our rooms during the night because we don’t have private bathrooms.” It was a thought that had already arisen in my mind.

  “As long as you go directly from your room to the bathroom and back, that should be no problem.”

  31

  “Benthrop’s right, Hubie. Someone’s killing them off one at a time.”

  “Who is them?”

  “The Ten Little Indians.”

  Susannah was in the bed. I had positioned my pallet on the floor so my feet were against the door. It was locked, of course, but who said the killer couldn’t have a key?

  “There are only two Indians here, Maria and Srini, and neither one of them has been killed.”

  “Ten Little Indians doesn’t refer to the victims, Hubert. It was a mystery novel based on a poem. You’ve probably heard the poem. ‘Ten little Indian boys went out to dine. One choked to death and then there were nine’.”

  “I think I have heard it, but I don’t know the mystery novel.”

  “It was originally published as Ten Little N-words.”

  “Ten Little N-words? That’s a strange – oh. The book actually had the N-word in the title?”

  “Well, it was back about the time when Lawrence was here, so I guess people still used that word.”

  “But to put it in the title of a book? That’s shocking even for back then.”

  “I guess someone agreed with you, because they changed it to Ten Little Indians.”

  “I don’t know it by that title either. I’m not a fan of murder mysteries, Suze.”

  “But you are a fan of old movies, so I bet you know And Then There Were None.”

  “I love that film. After the people are stranded on the island, one of the women says, ‘The boat won't come until Monday’. Then the character played by C. Aubrey Smith says, in his best stiff-upper-lip fashion, ‘No boat will ever come. We're here forever’.”

  “That’s scary, Hubert. You don’t think we’ll be here forever, do you?”

  “I think the Smith character was right – no boat will ever come.”

  “This is not the time for jokes. What’s happening here is exactly what happened in the movie, except the ways they’re dying are different. But you’d expect that since this is New Mexico and not England.”

  “But there are more than ten people here.”

  “Right. But there are only ten dignitaries. Or were. Now we’re down to eight.” She furrowed her brow for a moment and then said, “Oh my God! I remember the line for number eight. It goes, ‘one overslept and then there were eight’. Remember, Hubie? Winant overslept this morning.”

  “I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, Suze. And he died from freezing, not oversleeping.”

  I certainly didn’t think we were trapped in an English whodunit, and I don’t suppose Susannah did either, but it did seem to me there might be an important point in her ramblings. “Saunders said if we knew what the victims had in common, we might be able to figure out why someone might want them dead. Did you pick up any connections between the attendees from talking with them?”

  “No. I assumed they were all donors, but we didn’t talk about that.”

  “Did anyone say anything that struck you as surprising or odd?”

  She mulled it over for a few seconds. “I was surprised when Srini told me had had been invited at the last minute.”

  I shrugged. “Probably just the Post Office being slow in delivering his invitation.”

  “He didn’t get it by mail. They phoned him.”

  “Saunders got his by mail. He just happened to mention it because there was a brochure included with it.”

  “You think it’s a clue?”

  “Not that I can see. Maybe Srini was just a last-minute replacement for someone who backed out.”

  “Maybe someone who was good at predicting the weather,” she quipped.

  “Did he say why he accepted the invitation?”

  “Yes. He thought it would be interesting. But mainly he was afraid he would be violating some American protocol if he refused.”

  “I wonder why the others agreed to come.”

  “Maybe they wanted to see the ranch. Or maybe they wanted to hear a lecture about Lawrence or Indian pottery.” She passed briefly then asked, “Where’s the old pot you brought?”

  “I left it on the table next to the projector.”

  She shook her head. “We moved all the tables over for dinner, and we had to take the laptop and projector off the table you used before we moved it. The pot wasn’t there. Are you sure you didn’t put it back in the Bronco?”

  “Positive. Maybe someone moved it while you were dragging the other tables over for dinner.”

  She was certain that hadn’t happened, but of course anyone could have noticed it sitting there during the day and taken the precaution to move it to a safer place so it wouldn’t get accidentally damaged. Maybe Don had put it in the office for safekeeping, I thought. But the thought was also in the back of my mind that someone had stolen it, and I immediately started worrying about that. So I got up and put on trousers and a sweater and went out to the main room where I was greeted by suspicious looks.

  32

  Vasquez and Saunders were on sentry duty and taking their responsibility seriously.

  “Where are you going?” Saunders asked me.

  “I just realized I don’t know where my Anasazi pot is, and I’m worried about it.”

  “I’m sorry Schuze, but we can’t allow you to roam around looking for your pot. We have to assume that anyone could be the killer.”

  I had started back to the bedroom when Agatha Cruz came down the hall. She was wearing a frumpy long robe and pink fuzzy slippers. She appeared to have layers of warm clothing under the robe. She resembled a garbage bag stuffed with newspapers.

  “Can we help you, Ms. Cruz?” asked Saunders.

  “I’m scared of staying alone. Can I stay with Ms. Glain?”

  Saunders looked at Vasquez who shrugged, and Saunders told her it would be alright if Ms. Glain agreed.

  Agatha was knocking on Glain’s door when Susannah came out into the hall. Saunders asked her what she was doing, and she said she got worried when I didn’t come back and came out to see if anything was the matter.

  Then Patel came out and asked what all the racket was about, and Vasquez and Saunders rose up from their chairs and started trying to get everyone back into their rooms. Canon came out and asked why so many people were roaming around when we were supposed to have sentries. They told him to go back to his room and not become part of the problem, but he asked Robert Saunders why he had not been chosen as one of the sentries, and Robert started explaining to him that there were only six slots, and he just picked people at random, but Canon didn’t buy that and kept pressing him about whether there was really another reason he had been left off sentry duty.

  Then Carl Wron came out to go to the bathroom but stopped when he saw the crowd and asked why everyone was up, which only added to the confusion because Saunders and Vasquez were trying to answer questions and watch everyone at the same time.

  Then Maria came out. She was wearing a tee-shirt that revealed a substantial portion of her legs. They were thick but not fat looking, and they were very nicely shaped, just the sort of legs needed to properly support a pleasingly plump woman. At the bottom of her legs she had the requisite number of feet, each with the standard numbers of toe
s, and each toe had a nail at its end, nicely trimmed and painted red. It took me a while to establish all this, and I may have missed a few things that were going on in the crowd, but that’s just because I’m a man and therefore not very adept at multi-tasking.

  When I had finished visually reconnoitering Maria’s legs, I looked up at her and she was staring right into my eyes, and I felt like I had been caught in the act, although I wasn’t really doing anything except looking. I felt even warmer in my sweater. But she was smiling at me, so I didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, I felt remarkably good.

  She stepped over close to me and stood on tippy-toes so that she could whisper in my ear, something that is a rare experience for me. Not having my ear whispered into - that happens to me about as often as it does to most people, I suppose. The unusual part was having someone need to stand on tippy-toes to do the whispering.

  “Betty asked me to ask you if you would be willing to switch rooms.”

  “She wants Susannah and me to move into your room and let you and Betty move into ours?”

  She giggled. “No, silly. She wants you and me to trade. I would share a room with Susannah and you would share a room with Betty.”

  “Oh.”

  Sometimes I’m a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to ‘relationships’.

  But after I finally grasped the implications of the question, I realized there were more implications than I had grasped.

  My mind was racing. It crossed my mind (on the second or third lap of the race) that maybe Betty hadn’t asked that question at all and this was some sort of test. Then it crossed my mind that it would be good to know who had been playing footsy with me at dinner. Then it crossed my mind that maybe Betty was the murderer and she wanted me alone to make me victim number three. Then it crossed my mind that maybe Maria was the murderer and she wanted to be alone with Susannah to make her victim number three.

  Then Howard Glover came out and said, “What the hell is going on out here?” and we all fell silent and turned to him.