Of course I was hoping it wouldn’t turn out that way.
The next few hours are muddled in my memory. All I remember is that the state police arrived, questioned us and let us go home.
35
Tuesday was a good day. I slept until noon then ate a long and leisurely breakfast with a chilled flute of Gruet.
I didn’t open the shop until almost two, sold a replica of a San Ildefonso collar pot for a thousand dollars, and was thinking about closing early to celebrate with a nap.
Then Whit Fletcher arrived.
“You don’t look happy to see me, Hubert. You got a guilty conscience?”
“Why should I?”
“Maybe stealing all those pots over the years is catching up with you.”
“I don’t steal them, Whit. They don’t belong to anybody.”
“That’s what you always say.” He sidled over to the counter and braced himself against it on one elbow. “Maybe you’re worried about those three dead people they found with you up in Taos.”
I assumed it had been a big news item, so of course he would know about it. For my part, I was trying to ignore it. I’d spent most of the time since then taking long hot showers, sleeping, eating comfort foods, and reading a book called Zero. It’s subtitled The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. I’m not making this up. It’s easy to forget about murder when you’re absorbed in such an abstract topic. So maybe I’m weird, but I’m confident it’s a better way to pass the time than watching a bunch of idiots pretending to be stranded on a desert island when you know full well there is an entire Hollywood film crew there with air-conditioned trailers and make-up mirrors. Reality television is an oxymoron. And the people in it are genuine morons.
I hadn’t read a newspaper or left the building. I don’t have many skills, but one of them is the ability to shut things out of my mind. Some people would say that’s a handicap rather than a skill, but I’ve never worried about things just because most other people do. I know I’m supposed to care who gets elected president and who wins on American Idol, but I don’t. The two can switch places for all I care. In fact, I suspect we would be better off if they did. So I hadn’t spent much time worrying about what had happened at the Ranch. I won’t say the images and questions weren’t still popping into my mind, but I sent them packing when they did.
I told Fletcher I regretted that three people had been killed, but there was nothing to be gained by me worrying about it.
He shifted his weight to the other elbow and pushed his lank silver hair out of his eyes. “I guess you’re right. Still, you’ve been pretty good at figuring out things like that when you put your mind to it.”
“I had a reason to put my mind to it in those cases, Whit. You were accusing me of murder.”
“Aw, Hubert, I never done that. I told you I knew you wasn’t guilty.”
“Well this time I’m not even accused, and I like it that way.”
“Sure you do. Anyone would. Nobody wants to be the suspect. But this is a tough case, Hubert. Three people dead, the public’s going to expect some action.”
He was looking around at the merchandise, something he never does. “Why are you telling me this, Whit? Taos isn’t in your jurisdiction.”
“That’s true, Hubert, but we cops have to work together. It’s that whatchamacallit – professional courtesy. I bet even pot thieves do the same sort of thing, help each other out when they can.”
His eyes stopped scanning the room and came to rest on the counter in front of me. I said nothing and finally he looked up and made eye contact.
“Whit,” I said, “spit it out.”
“O.K., you and me been friends a long time, Hubert. I know I had to arrest you a few times, but that was just me doin’ my job, no hard feelings either way. And you know I never tried to make it stick ‘cause I know you’re not the criminal sort ‘cept for digging up old pots, and who the hell cares about that? So it would be a feather in my cap if I could solve this here major triple homicide, and I’m asking you to help.”
“Why me?”
“You was there, Hubert. You must have noticed things. Like I said, you’re pretty good at figuring things out when you put your mind to it. Besides, there’s talk of a reward, and we could split it.”
I figured as much. Whit has a nose for money. I told him I might want something from him in return. I wanted to recover my Anasazi pot, and I figured I might need police assistance to do so. I couldn’t very well file a theft report since I didn’t have the legal right to own the pot in the first place. But informal police assistance might be exactly what I would need, so – not for the first time – we agreed to scratch each other’s backs.
36
I was in such a good mood on my way to Dos Hermanas that I not only cut through the plaza, I even walked up and through the gazebo. In celebration of the fact that I can choose to close any time I want, I was singing
The man who only lives for making money
Lives a life that isn't necessarily sunny
Fall in love and you won't regret it
Nice work if you can get it
And you can get it if you try
I fancied that I sounded like Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress. He was a lot taller and danced better, but I can sing as well as he did.
I told Susannah and Martin about Whit’s visit. We hadn’t seen Martin since our return from Taos, so she filled him in on our adventure on the mountain.
“You left out the part about how I felt when I found Fidelio Duran’s pot.”
“It’s not Fidelio Duran’s pot,” she replied. “Dead people don’t own things.”
“I’ve been telling you that for years, Suze. That’s why it’s O.K. to dig up old pots. They belong to the living.”
She turned to Martin. “That pot gave Hubie an epiphany.”
“And I didn’t even smoke it.”
She and Martin groaned in unison, and he asked what kind of epiphany.
“I can’t describe it.”
“I can,” said Susannah, “It’s called greed.”
“Actually, it was quite the opposite. I admit I think of the money when I dig up a pot, but my first thoughts are always about the potter, the sense of connection across time. Maybe this was just a stronger version of that because I knew a few details about the actual potter.”
Susannah said to Martin, “He smelled the pot to see if he could detect the stew that was in it eighty years ago.”
“The man has a good nose,” Martin conceded.
“I couldn’t smell anything, of course. And I couldn’t really feel anything either. Too cold. But I imagined the warmth of his hands on the pot and the scent of the chiles in the stew.”
“Oh, brother,” said Susannah.
“I know what your epiphany was,” Martin announced.
“Was it that I did a good thing taking the pot so it could go home?”
“I don’t think it was something you did. Something you realized.”
We sat in silence while I tried to figure out what I had realized. “I realized the pot was intimately connected to Fidelio Duran and not to D. H. Lawrence?”
“What else?” he prompted.
“That I didn’t own the pot?”
He nodded. “The reason you don’t understand the epiphany is you think the feeling of not owning the pot was peculiar to this one incident. Because of the deal you struck with the great-grandson.”
“You saying I don’t own any of the pots I dig up?”
He shrugged. “Marx said the first form of ownership is tribal.”
Susannah turned up her palms. “We’re not going to talk about Karl Marx, are we? This is a bar, guys. We should talk about booze, romance, sports or movies.”
“Just for a minute,” said Martin. “Fidelio Duran wouldn’t have thought of the pot as his property. Not because someone else owned it, but because the question wouldn’t have occurred to him. He needed a pot, so he made one. Each family made their own pots. Issues o
f ownership don’t arise until a society organizes around the division of labor and people are separated from what they make. When you make a pot in a factory, it doesn’t belong to you because it’s made to be sold. When you make one in a teepee, it doesn’t belong to you because it’s not made to be sold.”
“Yeah, I took Marxism 101,” said Susannah. “Workers in complex societies are alienated from the things they create. And I can’t believe you said ‘teepee’.”
“I like the sound of it,” he replied.
I still hadn’t figured out what Martin was trying to say. “So why don’t I own the pots I dig up?”
“Because they were not made to be owned.”
“They weren’t made to be left in the ground, either.”
“You can’t own them,” he said, “but you can care for them. You realized in Taos that you were just the custodian for that pot. What you didn’t realize, but felt in an inchoate was, was that you are always just the custodian.”
Susannah frowned. “First Marx and now ‘inchoate’, whatever the hell that means.”
“I can see I sometimes have a custodial duty to return pots to someone, like the stolen Ma pots I recovered or the Duran pot. But what about the ones where there is no one to return them to?”
He smiled. “Then your job is to find them a good home.”
“And it’s O.K. to be paid for that service?”
He held up an empty Tecate can. “You buying?”
I nodded.
37
The first European to see what is now Albuquerque was a captain Alvarado with Conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s expedition in the 1540s. The settlement along the banks of the Rio Grande wasn’t named Albuquerque until many years later when Governor Cuervo y Valdez named the city in honor of the Viceroy of New Spain, the Duke of Alburquerque. The first “r” was dropped at some point. The contemporary New Mexican novelist Rudolfo Anaya claims the dropped “r” was a deliberate attempt to deemphasize the Hispanic roots of my home town. If so, it failed miserably. No matter how you spell Albuquerque, it will always have its Hispanic character.
Like most major cities, Albuquerque sits at a junction, the Rio Grande running north/south and a road running east/west that eventually became Route 66, the Federal Highway from Chicago to Los Angeles. Interstate 40 has supplanted 66 and the old 66 is now known as Central Avenue. The Nob Hill stretch of Central has been undergoing an uneven gentrification. The area further east is home mostly to low-rent businesses – small cafes, specialty shops, a few rundown motels, and the odd adult bookstore and baseball trading card establishment. One old edifice a handful of yards from the intersection with San Mateo is called the Alvarado building, and it looks like it might have been established by the captain of that name in Coronado’s expedition. At the back of that building and next to a nail salon run by Vietnamese immigrants, I found the office of the Albuquerque Chapter of Justice Now.
I opened the glass door and stepped into a room with faded orange shag carpet, paneled walls of fake oak, an acoustic ceiling and a buzzing fluorescent light with one tube blinking at random. There was a dodgy-looking couch with stained cushions, a glass coffee table covered with pamphlets, and a metal desk of the sort usually found at used furniture shops. A nameplate on the desk identified it as the station of Wanda Reynolds, but Wanda was away from her desk.
I heard murmurs in an adjoining room and cleared my throat. A gawky woman with large blue eyes and straggly blond hair came in from the next room and asked if she could help me. She had a friendly innocent look and a nice smile.
I told her I was Hubert Schuze and had come about Carla Glain. She burst into tears and hugged me. She smelled like baby powder.
She stepped back and grasped both my hands. “We are so glad you have come. Please come in and meet the staff.” Before I could react, she dragged me into the next room. There were some candles burning on a folding table in front of a glossy picture of Carla Glain that looked like a blow-up from a high school album.
“I want you to meet our team leader, Fred Givens. And this is Rhonda Marisol. She’s a field agent like Carla was. This is Tommy Behrent, he’s our fiscal officer. He’s supposed to be part-time, but like everyone else, he’s so dedicated that he works from dawn to dusk. This is our client services coordinator, Sylvia True, and this is Ron Gore, the other field agent. And of course I’m Wanda, the administrative assistant.”
I decided against constructing a mental walk. I had no reason to remember these people.
“Wanda is the real boss,” said Givens. Everyone tittered appreciatively. “Now that you’re here, we can get started.”
I was as confused as a rabbi at a rodeo. “I don’t really know what—”
“Of course,” Givens cut in. “How unthinking of me. I guess we’re all still so upset that we’re not thinking very clearly. Let me tell you what we have planned. We want you to go first and just say whatever you want to about Carla. Then each of us who worked with her will say whatever comes into our hearts. Then we’ll have a moment of silence. Carla was not one to stand on ceremony, and she didn’t care for fancy things, so we just all decided something low-key would be the sort of memorial service she would have wanted.”
They all smiled and looked at me. I had no idea why they thought I was there for the memorial service. Mistaken identity – that must be it. I started to tell them they must have me confused with someone else when Fred Givens smiled at me and said, “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Schuze.”
38
“That’s awful, Hubie. What did you do?”
“I gave a eulogy. What else could I do?”
It was a warm evening on the veranda at Dos Hermanas.
“But you hardly knew her. What did you say?”
What I had said was that we were gathered not to mourn because mourning cannot be done in the space of a mere afternoon and would be something we would each do in our own way and in our own time. We were gathered instead to celebrate the life of Carla Glain. And I said it was a life worthy of celebration because it was a life dedicated to the betterment of others. I said the best testimony to the effectiveness of her efforts was the esteem in which her colleagues held her. That even though I did not know them well (I did not mention that I knew them about as well as I knew Glain), I could see that esteem in their faces. I said their remarks would be more meaningful than mine, and with that in mind, I would keep my own words brief. I noted that she was dedicated to justice, fiercely protective of society’s most vulnerable members, and not easily swayed by social norms.”
“That last phrase was a zinger, Hubie. Not only was she not swayed by social norms, she threw them in your face.”
“They saw it as positive.”
“Of course they did. With all that first stuff, you made her sound like mother Theresa.”
“It was a eulogy, Suze. I couldn’t very well say she had the personality of a barracuda. But you’ll love my last line: She faced the evils of destiny and deflected them with good.”
“You made that up?”
“No, I remembered it from that book I read on Pythagoras. It’s from one of his poems.”
“And they bought it?”
“They loved it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd. Afterwards, they heaped praises on me. I’m telling you, Suze, it was all I could do to get out of there. I may have a new career as a eulogist.”
“Eulogist is not an occupation, Hubert. What I don’t get is how they knew who you were and why they expected you.”
“Turns out all our names were listed in the article in the paper about the deaths at the Ranch. Fred Givens has a friend at the paper, and he asked his friend to try and contact one of us to see if we would attend the memorial. They wanted someone who had ‘been with her at the end’ as they put it. They seemed to be under the impression that we were a group, that we knew each other or had some common interest.”
“We did have a common interest,” said Susannah, “getting out alive. I’m not
surprised the friend at the newspaper couldn’t talk anyone into going. And I can understand that when you showed up, they assumed he had sent you. But why did you go there?”
“I already told you. I agreed to help Fletcher solve the murders. I figured the best way to start was to interview everyone who was at the Ranch.”
“What was it, Hubert, a memorial service or a séance? ‘Cause unless it was a séance, I don’t see how you could interview Carla Glain.”
“I’ll interview the survivors, but I also want to find out everything I can about the victims.”
“So what did you learn about Carla?”
“Almost nothing. She didn’t attend college and had no money, so she was almost certainly not a donor to UNM. However, they told me she worked as a volunteer in the Governor’s campaign, so maybe the University invited her because they thought she had some political clout.”
“Being a volunteer doesn’t give you clout. There are hundreds of them. I’ll bet the Governor wouldn’t even recognize most of them.”
“I don’t know if he would have recognized her, but he did appoint her to the Gaming Commission.”
“What? She’s an expert on Monopoly or Chinese checkers?”
“The Gaming Commission regulates gambling, Suze.”
“Gambling is not a game.”
“I guess Carla agreed with you. I asked why she would want to be on the Gaming Commission, and Givens said she wanted to advocate for the poor who lose their meager paychecks at the tables every week.”
“So now what?”
“I’m going to see someone else from the group. Did you make prints of those pictures?”
The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence Page 13
