“So maybe their acronym is appropriate.”
“Exactly. But meanwhile, they pay their lawyers to delay and they rake in money.”
“Enough to pay Adele Carlton a hundred thousand dollars?”
“You know how much gambling brings in, Suze? I think it was about eight hundred million last year.”
“But how much of that was in New Mexico?”
“All of it. I’m just talking about New Mexico. That’s over two million a day!”
“But surely even CONMEE doesn’t hire hit-women.”
“Whit says their official position is they paid Carlton as a lobbyist to influence the Gaming Commission.”
“I guess killing off the members is one form of influence,” she joked, and then she thought for a while and said, “You said Agatha Cruz’s glasses were greasy. Or should I say Adele Carlton’s glasses were greasy?”
“Agatha Cruz was a character being played by Adele, so I guess we can talk about Agatha just like we talk about other characters in a play or movie. And the greasy glasses? They helped me to figure it all out.”
“How?”
“Well, it wasn’t what started me wondering about Cruz, but once I did start wondering, it helped complete the picture. When I first saw her glasses, I just thought here’s an old lady whose eyesight is so bad she doesn’t even know her glasses need cleaning. But once I began to wonder if it was an act, I remembered a girl I knew at UNM who was majoring in rehabilitation.”
“And I thought I knew all the majors.”
“In one of her classes – the girl’s name was Betsy – the teacher made them rub petroleum jelly on their glasses and walk around campus for a day so they would have more empathy for people with vision problems.”
“Wouldn’t people majoring in rehab have empathy to begin with?”
“You would hope so.”
“And what about students who didn’t wear glasses?”
“Maybe they gave them theatrical glasses, ones that just have plain glass. I saw some of those at the costume and theater shop.”
“So how did cute little Betsy walking around with Vaseline on her glasses help you figure out that Agatha Cruz was a fake?”
“Cute little Betsy had an underslung jaw and one solid eyebrow that covered both eyes.”
“That’s called a unibrow.”
“I didn’t know that. Anyway, when she greased up her glasses, she moved slowly and tentatively to avoid tripping because she couldn’t judge the height of curbs and thresholds, and she would reach out slowly because she couldn’t tell how far away a door knob or a pencil on a desk was. The result was that she moved exactly like an elderly person.”
“I don’t think we say ‘elderly’ anymore, Hubie.”
“O.K., she moved like a senior citizen, one with a bushy unibrow. Agatha put grease on her glasses to make her move like a senior citizen. That’s a lot easier than faking the movements, even for an actress.”
“But what first got you suspicious?”
“You get the credit, Suze. When I thought more about where Cruz had gone and the lack of tracks, and when I dismissed anyone coming up or down the cliff, I realized we had a locked-room mystery just like you said. And I remembered that you said one version was that the murderer was in the room all along but cleverly hidden.”
“Being under a bed is not that clever, Hubert.”
“I know that, but if there’s an open window, who’s going to look under the bed? Come to think of it, why would a murderer hide under the bed in the circumstances we were in anyway? The killer would have to come out eventually and couldn’t get away without being seen. But if you can come out from under the bed as a different person, then you’re home free. And you also get credit for the ‘different person’ idea because you explained that the character in The Man Who Died was both Isiris and Jesus. I also remembered in And Then There Were None, the judge says the murderer, ‘could only come to the island in one way. It's perfectly clear. He is one of us’. That led me to the hypothesis that Agatha and Adele might be the same person. Then I thought about the wet robe and sneakers, the greasy glasses, and the smell, and it all fell into place.”
“So Adele glued on fake wrinkles, put on a grey wig, and greased up her glasses.”
“Right.”
“What about Carrasco?”
“He was a cool customer. He knew his true identity wouldn’t stay hidden, so when he drove down to get the police, he told them right off who he was and said he’d been filling in for a friend. Pretending to be someone else isn’t a crime unless you do so for criminal purposes, and he more or less had Canon’s permission anyway. You know something, Suze? I should have figured him out. The University blazer he was wearing didn’t fit him. He didn’t know about the electricity situation when we asked, and he didn’t know how far it was to the main road when Saunders asked him.”
“You think he was in on the murders?”
“He didn’t do them, but it’s hard to believe he didn’t know what his girlfriend was up to. He certainly knew afterwards. The police let him go last night from my shop only because they wanted to follow him. He led them to a dumpster a few blocks from Srini’s apartment. He dug around in it until he found an iron bar, and then the police grabbed him.”
“The murder weapon!”
“Yep. He led them right to it.”
“So he’s an accessory.”
“Yeah, but only after the fact, which is not as serious, and he was trying to help the woman he loves. Who knows if a jury would convict him. He could even claim he was trying to help the police find the murder weapon.”
“I don’t think that would fly, Hubie. So he may not go to jail?”
“Not unless she implicates him. But she hasn’t so far, and how would that help her?”
“Maybe she’d get a lighter sentence?”
“I don’t think it works that way. They lessen the sentences for small fish who rat out the big fish. They already have the big fish. My guess is she doesn’t want to implicate him. She loves him and wants him to be waiting for her when she gets out.”
“You don’t think she’ll get the death penalty?”
“This isn’t Texas, Suze. There has been exactly one person executed in New Mexico in the last thirty years. Anyway, her lawyers will probably plead insanity.”
“You think she’s crazy, Hubert?”
“She’s an actress, Suze. Maybe she can convince a jury.”
“And she’s pretty good, Hubie. It can’t be that easy pretending to be another person for three days. I wonder if they have a theater group in the women’s prison.”
It was a pleasant spring evening with just a touch of smoke in the air from people burning their grass so their lawns would green up sooner. It’s illegal now, but people still do it, and it still works.
We waved for Angie and got another round. After it came and we sampled the fresh chips, salsa, and drinks, Susannah sat back in her chair and asked me if I wanted to answer the first question now.
I said I did and told her Maria wasn’t there because she told Whit she didn’t want to come.
“I don’t think Carrasco or Carlton wanted to come either, but he didn’t give them a choice,” she noted.
“Yeah. I guess Whit could have forced Maria to come as a material witness or something, and when he told me she had refused to attend, he did ask if I wanted him to force the issue, and I said no.”
“You didn’t want her there?”
“I didn’t want to force her into an uncomfortable situation.”
“You were afraid she’d take off her clothes again?”
I almost choked on my drink. After I stopped coughing, I told her the reason it would have been uncomfortable was that there was someone there other than me who Maria was sort of involved with romantically.
She gave me a puzzled look, and I sat back in my chair and watched her going through the list of attendees in her mind.
“One of the uniformed policemen?”
I shook my head.
“Fred Givens?”She sounded a little incredulous on that one.
“No.”
“It can’t be Carrasco. All the other guys are too old except... Oh my God! Don’t tell me it’s Srini.”
“It isn’t Srini.”
“Whew. Surely not Tristan.”
“Nope.”
All that leaves is Figg, and surely she—”
“It’s not Figg.”
“But I’ve mentioned everyone who was there.”
“You haven’t mentioned Don Canon.”
“I ruled him out because Maria would have recognized Carrasco was not Canon.”
“She didn’t know Canon.”
“But you said they were romantically involved.”
“I said sort of. They had recently been corresponding through a computer dating service.”
“Where you don’t give your last name,” she said knowingly.
“Right. Remember Don said last night that he didn’t want to stay at the Ranch after he found out the event had been cancelled? The reason is he was hoping to go into town and actually meet Maria for the first time in person. But she didn’t know that, so she accepted the catering offer from Carrasco pretending to be Canon. The name Canon didn’t mean anything to her and Don is fairly common, so she had no reason to be suspicious. Then last Friday, she showed up on my doorstep and we had a romantic evening—”
“Until I barged in.”
I waved the air. “Don’t worry about it. You had good reason. Anyway, she wasn’t there when I got back. I talked to the real Canon early Sunday afternoon in preparation for the big meeting in my shop. That’s when I told him I would be calling on him to speak and we discussed what he would say. He told me he already knew quite a bit about what had gone on up at the Ranch. I asked him if the police had filled him in, and he said not very much, but he said he had learned more because he spent most of Saturday with a woman who had been at the Ranch with us.”
“And you asked him who it was, and he said Maria Salazar.”
I nodded.
“What did you say, Hubie?”
I sighed. “I said she seemed like a nice young lady, and he said she was and that he was smitten with her and that they had another date on Monday.”
“That’s tonight. Geez, Hubie, you must feel awful. You want to get drunk and forget her?”
“Maybe a little drunk. But I don’t want to forget her. The memory is bittersweet.”
“You’re a real romantic, Hubie.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Maybe she still likes you.”
“Maybe she never really did,” I said morosely.
“Then why did she take off all her clothes for you?”
I smiled at her. “Maybe it was another case of paradoxical undressing.”
55
I was sitting with Ninfa Sanchez under the pecan trees sipping fresh-squeezed limeade.
She has a long face, clear brown skin, and a hooked nose that makes her look like an Aztec carving. She’s two or three inches taller than me and is too tall to be described as plump, so I guess maybe she’s statuesque. Her long straight hair was pulled back severely and held with what looked like a piece of leather with a chopstick through it.
Emilio was in the house preparing lunch and had been firm in rejecting our offers to help. Consuela was still in the hospital.
“It’s like being a little girl again,” Ninfa said. Our homemade willow lawn chairs were next to each other but she was staring off towards the levee.
“Back in the house you grew up in.”
“Not just that. He does everything for me. I can’t cook, clean, run a wash. Hell, I should just stay here.”
“Beto wouldn’t like that.”
“You might be surprised.”
I decided not to pursue that remark. Consuela and Emilio were sad when Ninfa and Beto moved to California, but Beto had a good job offer and they settled into a small tract house in Orange County that’s probably worth half a million now even though it’s not in a particularly upscale neighborhood.
“You look good,” I said.
“For someone who just had a body part removed?”
“That’s one way to thin down.”
She laughed and then told me her mother had two great hopes – to have a grandchild and to live close to her daughter. “I’ve withheld both from her,” she said.
“There’s plenty of time. My mother was forty one when I was born.”
“Beto doesn’t want children.”
“You could move back here. One out of two ain’t bad.”
“Beto says he won’t work for the slave wages they pay here.”
“And your parents can’t afford California.”
“And wouldn’t leave here even if they could afford it,” she said and turned to look at me. “I guess it’s a Mexican standoff.”
I looked up into the trees. You’re supposed to be able to tell how good the pecan crop will be by examining the spring foliage, but I don’t know how to do that. It’s sort of like telling how long it will rain, an interesting skill but one I have no need for. Of course I have no need to look at the heavens through my telescopes and I do that.
“I can’t come back here, Hubert.”
Ninfa had always been slightly rebellious. When I think back on her as a small child, I always picture her with her chin stuck out.
“You gave her part of you, Ninfa. You gave her life. You should feel good about that.”
“It’s not what she wanted.”
“It’s not what she says she wanted,” I corrected.
“You think so?”
“It doesn’t matter what you say. She thinks someday you’ll have children.”
“She thinks that’s what women do.”
“It is what women do. Most of them. It isn’t all they do.”
“What? You’re a feminist philosopher now?”
Defiant. That’s the word I was searching for. “You gave her more time. More time to hope.”
“I’m not going to have children, Hubert.”
I was still looking up at the pecan leaves. “She doesn’t believe that.”
“You think hope is enough?”
“It’s better than no hope. And she’ll be less frantic because death is not so imminent.”
“Thanks to you,” she said, still looking off in the distance.
“You’re the one who gave her a kidney.”
“You’re the one who paid for it.”
“It was paid—”
“And don’t give me that bullshit about insurance. My parents believe you because they don’t know any better. But what kind of health insurance can you get where the insured never filled out any forms, never signed anything? Still never sign anything. But you say they have insurance and they believe you.”
“Belief is good, too,” I said. “Like hope.”
56
We were out on the veranda of Dos Hermanas, square in the rays of the setting sun. I used to worry about skin cancer, but a New Mexico evening is worth the risk.
“I was impressed with how you solved the murders at the Lawrence Ranch, Hubie.”
“Thanks, Suze. I couldn’t have done it without you. I’ll bet you can solve another mystery.”
“Which mystery?”
“The one of my missing pot.”
“How could I do that?”
“By the oldest reasoning process known to man, the process of elimination.”
“It’s known to women too, Hubert. O.K., I guess my theory about someone coming in from outside the Conference Center was pretty much blown out of the water when we discovered Adele was the culprit.”
I nodded.
“So it had to be one of the sixteen people there.”
“Fifteen.”
“Oh, right. Cruz wasn’t a real person. I know it wasn’t you or me. I’m just as sure it wasn’t Srini. It obviously wasn’t one of the three victims.”
> “See, you’ve eliminated six people already.”
“I don’t think any of the four donors would steal it. They’re all rich and give to a good cause. Plus, they just seem like nice people.”
“Now you’re down to five suspects.”
“I don’t think it was Maria. I don’t think it was Carrasco or Carlton. When you’re sneaking around pretending to be someone else and killing people, you probably aren’t thinking about lesser crimes like petty theft.”
“An Anasazi pot is hardly petty.”
“You know what I mean. So that leaves Vasquez and Benthrop. Vasquez is a little slick, but what do you expect? He’s a lobbyist. But I don’t see him as a thief, so it must be Benthrop. Was it Benthrop, Hubie? I really hope it was him.”
“I don’t know, but I went through the same process of elimination and came up with the same result. And I also remembered something. When we were in Fred Rich’s room after he was killed, Benthrop was the first to leave, so he would have been alone briefly in the main room.”
“That’s right,” she agreed.
“At first I thought he left because he was embarrassed by that ‘I’m a doctor’ remark, but then I realized he’s not the sort of person to be embarrassed by anything.”
“Too caught up in himself.”
“Exactly.”
“So Benthrop did steal your pot.”
“Well, we can’t be certain of that. For all we know, Robert Saunders is a kleptomaniac.”
“So what do we do to prove it was Benthrop?”
“We talk to Whit Fletcher.”
57
“Three murders and the reward is a measly five thousand. Can you believe that? That’s what – less than two thousand for each stiff. After I split it with you, that’s what?”
“Eight hundred and thirty-three dollars and thirty-three and a third cents for each murder,” I told him.
“If you say so. I tell you, Hubert, they say crime don’t pay, but solving crimes don’t pay much better.”
I had cancelled my standing engagement at five because I wasn’t planning to drink anything. It was a little past nine in the evening, and Fletcher was drinking coffee that had been steeping since that morning. He sat the cup down on my counter and swallowed without even flinching. Meanwhile, I was doing some quick thinking, and when I had done it, I told him he could keep the whole five thousand.
The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence Page 19
