His attempt to contain his excitement was palpable – an extra twenty five hundred is a substantial boost for a cop’s pay.
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch. I just need a couple of favors.”
“I figured as much.”
“Nothing you wouldn’t do anyway, Whit. And it may bring you another collar.”
Then I told him about my suspicions that Benthrop had stolen my pot, and he asked me if I owned the pot or if it was one I had stolen myself. I told him the pot was all mine, bought and paid for from Martin’s uncle. You know that isn’t true, but he didn’t and, as you will see, one of Martin’s uncle’s pots did come into play.
Fletcher also told me that when they questioned Benthrop about his activities before, during, and after the fateful weekend, the shopping he had been doing in Taos was for Native American handicrafts. That didn’t surprise me in light of his belief that the next level of human consciousness would bring peoples of color into their ascendancy, or the next ascendancy of peoples of color would bring human consciousness into its next level, or whatever his nutty theory was. What I really wondered was whether his shopping for Native American artifacts had included the use of a five-finger credit card to add my pot to his collection.
So after Whit left, I wrapped one of Martin’s Uncle’s pots in bubble wrap and drove the Bronco to a parking lot on the east side of the University. From there I walked to a low-slung adobe on Buena Vista, three blocks from the lot.
I had Tristan’s cell phone with me. I stood across the street and dialed. I spoke a few words and hung up. A few minutes later Benthrop emerged and sped away. The coast is clear, I thought to myself, and then realized I don’t really understand that common phrase. Does it mean the weather on the coast is good? Does it mean there’s no one guarding the coast so an amphibious assault will succeed? And why do I care? There are no coasts in the desert.
Then I shook myself out of this pointless woolgathering and set about the task at hand. I had brought along several thin pieces of plastic from among a collection of samples I obtained from an art supply store. I’m really not a burglar, but being able to loid a lock (open it by sliding a flexible strip of something between the spring-loaded bolt and the jamb; you’ve probably heard of this being done with credit cards) is sometimes useful. I didn’t need to do it in this case because Benthrop had left in such a hurry that he didn’t even bother to lock up.
I found my Anasazi pot after a few minutes of searching and I left the pot I had brought along in a different spot, one where Benthrop would be unlikely to look. Martin’s uncle does excellent and complete glazing of all his pots, so being submerged in water would cause the pot no harm.
58
“So it was Benthrop. I’m glad it was him, Hubie.”
“Because it shows the process of elimination works?”
“No, because he’s an insect.”
“I have to admit I enjoyed seeing him running away after Fletcher called him and said Carlton had escaped and was seen near his house.”
“Couldn’t Whit get in trouble for that?”
“He’ll just deny he said it. Who’s going to believe Benthrop over a detective on the Albuquerque Police Department?”
“So how did Benthrop look?’ she asked gleefully.
“Even in the dark, you could see the whites of his eyes. He was terrified.”
We both felt good about it. Now I remember. That’s what schadenfreude means. We were on the veranda, drinks in hand, chips and salsa at the ready, and I was ogling the angular yet graceful Angie. I didn’t need another round. I was just enjoying the sight of a sultry woman.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Hubie. Why did you hide one of Martin’s uncle’s pots? Couldn’t the police have just gone in themselves and found the Anasazi pot like you did? Then you wouldn’t have had to take the risk of breaking in.”
“I didn’t break in. The door was unlocked. But I had to switch the pots before the police went in. It wouldn’t have worked if they had found the Anasazi pot. They need two things to charge him with theft. First they have to find the stolen item in his possession. Second, they have to prove it belongs to someone else. I can’t prove the Anasazi pot is mine.”
“But you found it yourself and dug it out of bat shit.”
“I prefer to think of it as guano. Yeah, I found it, but it was illegal to dig it up.”
“Then why do you display it right out in the open in your shop?”
“Because for all anyone knows, I dug it up before the passage of ARPA when treasure hunting was legal, and that’s enough to satisfy a collector. But if Benthrop is charged with stealing it, his lawyer would no doubt want me to prove when I dug it up, and I can’t do that.”
“You didn’t tell me where you hid the pot when you got inside Benthrop’s house.”
I started to say I hid the pot in the pot, but that’s too much of a groaner even for me, so I told her I hid it in the toilet.
“Oh, yuk. Why did you do that, Hubert?”
“Not in the bowl, Suze, in the tank.”
I sat back and pictured Benthrop’s jaw hanging open as the police, warrant in hand, fished out the pot.
“Did you really have to give Fletcher your half of the reward for him to do that?”
“Maybe not. But I got a hundred thousand for the two Dulcinea pots, so I was feeling generous, and it doesn’t hurt to have Whit thinking he owes me.”
“How much did you have to spend on the medical bills?”
“About forty-seven thousand.”
“God, that’s expensive. Still, you cleared over fifty thousand. You’re buying, right?”
“I’m buying, but I already spent some of the fifty.”
“What did you do this time?”
“I set up three scholarships at the University.”
She smiled. “For Rich, Winant, and Glain.”
“Yeah, but only for ten thousand each, so I still cleared over twenty thousand, and tourist season is about to start, and I’ve got a lot of replicas ready, so things look pretty good.”
“I think I understand the math,” she said.
That would be a first, I started to say then thought better of it. I raised my glass. She did the same, and we clinked a toast to things coming out right.
“Of course things didn’t quite work out right between you and Maria, but there’s always Betty.”
“I don’t think so, Suze. I called her, and she said she’s seeing Carl Wron.”
“Oh.”
“Maria went for the younger man, Betty went for the older man, and I ended up being Mister In-Between. I guess they remembered that old Johnny Mercer song that tells us to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”
“Sorry, Hubie. But you still have Dolly.”
“She broke up with me the day we left for Taos.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? We were alone in the Bronco for hours.”
“Well, the reason she gave at first was something I was hesitant to mention to you.”
“We’re best friends, Hubie. You can tell me anything.” Then she got that crooked enigmatic smile and said, “Was it because you couldn’t—”
“I never told you that!”
“So I guessed it. That was the reason.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“Then what was it?”
“She said it was because I was taking you to Taos as my girlfriend.”
“What? She knows we’re just friends.”
“Then she changed the reason and said it was because I stole her dog.”
“You have got to be making this up.”
I shook my head and took a sip of my drink. “Do you remember the saga of Dolly and Geronimo?”
She rolled her eyes. “You were trying to figure out which house on that street had some pots, and the best ruse you could come up with was to go door to door with Geronimo pretending to be a volunteer from the an
imal shelter looking for the owner of a lost dog. That was bizarre even by your standards.”
“I prefer to think of it as ingenious. And it worked. I located the right house.”
“But not before a murder had taken place in it for which you got blamed.”
“And subsequently exonerated. No, Suze, it was a great plan. The only flaw was that Dolly volunteered to adopt Geronimo if the true owner couldn’t be found.”
“And when you kept him, you had to say that you had adopted him. Your whole relationship with Dolly has been built on a lie.”
“That may be a bit strong. But she must have somehow figured out what happened.”
“You think that’s why she’s been so unstable lately?”
I turned up my palms. “It’s a mystery to me.”
“What about the disappearance of the Jaune Quick-To-See Smith paintings?”
“Another mystery.”
“Don’t unsolved mysteries bother you?”
“Life is an unsolved mystery, Suze.”
“Oh, brother.”
“I’m on the outs with Dolly, Betty, and Maria. Let’s talk about you instead. You and Srini to be precise.”
She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “You were right about how things work in India, at least in his case. He said he plans to go back there in August because his family has selected a bride for him.”
Oops. Why did I have to bring this up? “But I thought you two had a date the other night.”
“I thought it was a date. He thought we were just two friends having fun.”
“So where does that leave us, Suze?”
“Back where we always are, Hubie. No romance in sight.”
Somehow I thought she was mistaken, but that’s probably just because I’m an optimist.
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POT THIEF ADVENTURE
9
The Pot Thief Who Studied Lew Wallace
“I would rather write another book than be rich.” - Lew Wallace
I was on a ledge three hundred feet above the Rio Grande violating two federal laws, one on purpose and the other by accident.
I felt a little like Indiana Jones except for the fact that I was afraid to approach the precipice. But my acrophobia didn’t stop me from digging. I’d been told there were ancient pots here, and I knew they would be in the ruins, not out on the ledge.
I’m not a professional archaeologist and I didn’t have a permit to excavate, so I was violating the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA).
So what?
Because of the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Architects and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, it would be impossible today for Abe Lincoln to be a lawyer, Frank Lloyd Wright to be an architect or Thomas Edison to be an electrical engineer.
And thanks to the Archaeological Institute of America, it’s also impossible for me to hunt for artifacts legally. Which was why I was digging under the cover of darkness.
Every association of ‘professionals’ wants to exclude amateurs. And the club of millionaires called Congress caved in to the wishes of professional archaeologists and passed APRA.
My name is Hubert Schuze, and I’m a treasure hunter. ARPA redefined me as a pot thief, but it was passed by the same legislature that approved a health care program with a price tag of 940 billion dollars and labeled it the ‘Affordable health Care Act’.
Here’s a message for my representatives in Washington: Health care is not affordable and archaeological resources do not need protecting.
If they’re resources, we should exploit them. That’s what I do, and I’m positive that’s what the people who created them would want. I’m a potter myself, and after I’m long dead, I don’t want the pots I made to be mouldering in the ground like John Brown’s body. I want some enterprising lad like myself to dig them up, appreciate them, and make a few bucks in the process. Maybe he can earn enough to see a doctor.
I do feel bad about the second law I was breaking, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Who other than a ghoul would violate that one?
But it wasn’t my fault. I was digging in a ruin of residences. Prehistoric tribes didn’t bury their dead in their living quarters. So you can imagine my surprise when I stuck my hand into the hole I’d dug and grasped another hand. I’d been hoping for an artifact, not a handshake.
It gets worse. Despite my instinctive recoil from the touch, I was in contact just long enough to realize the hand a hole in it. And the size of the hole seemed approximately the diameter of the piece of rebar I used to probe the ground. I had accidentally desecrated human remains.
I felt woozy. The chorizo I’d wolfed down for energy gurgled up my esophagus. I swallowed hard to keep it down.
Then I heard an even louder gurgling. It wasn’t my tummy rumbling. It was the familiar rurrer-rurrer-rurrer of the starter motor on my Bronco. Most people don’t know what a starter motor sounds like. They turn the key and hear only the reassuring roar of the engine coming to life. They have shiny new cars. But a thirty-two-year-old Ford Bronco doesn’t jump to life. Like its forty-something-year-old owner, it takes more time getting started than it used to.
I had left Geronimo in the Bronco. And while he sometimes displays a certain canine cunning, I didn’t think he was capable of starting the thing. But couldn’t he at least have barked at the car thief?
It wasn’t that I minded losing the vehicle. But the rope that had lowered me down to the ruin – and by which I planned to ascend back to the surface – was attached to the winch.
I was stranded in a prehistoric cliff dwelling three hundred feet above the ground below and thirty feet below the ground above.
Thirty feet is not that far. If it isn’t too steep, you could just walk up it. But then your enemies could come down it just as easily, which would defeat the purpose of a cliff dwelling.
Even if it were a perfectly vertical cliff, you could perhaps work your way up by using little rock fissures as hand and toe holds. But when the cliff is past vertical, when it slants away from the direction you want to go, the only way up is by rope. Like the one I had just watched disappear.
Of course there was another way out. There would be a path along the precipice to a point where the terrain allowed a narrow switchback climb up to the surface. The ancient cliff dwellers sought places with an overhang for protection and a narrow entrance path that could be easily guarded. One man can hold off an entire army if they have to approach single file. He just stands behind a rock next to the narrowest part of the path and pushes them over the edge as they creep along.
Just the thought of that narrowest part of the path made me break out in a cold sweat.
2
Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a cliff dwelling, I had to find that path and follow it.
But I wasn’t going to risk it at night. And I wasn’t going to sleep next to a disturbed grave. So I filled the hole and gently packed down the soil. I don’t know any prayers for reinterment, but I said what came to mind and meant every word of it.
I had my first aid kit, water, matches, a flashlight and a warm jacket with a pocket full of chorizo. It wasn’t everything you’d take on a wilderness camping trip, but it was enough. I also had the large gunny sack I had hoped would have a pot or two in it on the return trip and a piece of rebar, one end of which had recently been poked through a human hand.
I thought about tossing it over the ledge into the Rio Grande. But the way my luck was running, it would probably impale some hapless midnight whitewater enthusiast. I didn’t need that on my conscience, so I just stuck the thing in the ground, evil end first.
I rolled the jacket up for a pillow and bedded down behind what remained of a rock and mud wall. Maybe the prayer had cleansed my mind because I dropped off to sleep almost immediately.
The first time I woke up, it was because of the cold. I put the jacket on. The gunny sack
was not substantial enough to make a pillow, but at least it saved me from having to sleep with my head directly on the ground.
The second time I woke up, it was because of the rustling sound.
There was no wind. Something was moving through the brush. And getting nearer. I pulled the rebar out of the ground. Let it be a squirrel, I thought, although it was making way too much noise to be one.
A skunk would be o.k. Even a bobcat. They seldom attach humans. Just not a mountain lion. Or worse, a badger. A badger would probably bite through the rebar before bulldozing me off the cliff.
It was just a few feet away. I could hear it panting. I raised the rebar above my head just as it broke into the clearing and lept at me.
It would have served him right if I had brained him with the piece of iron. He didn’t bark to scare away the car thief, and he didn’t bark to let me know he was approaching. I swear he’s part anteater. I don’t think they bark. It would also explain the long neck that sags down and sways to and fro as he walks.
Despite the start he gave me, I was glad to see him. His feathery wagging tail and big sad eyes were part of it. But the main reason was that his arrival confirmed the path was still there and passable. He may be part anteater, but he is certainly not part mountain goat. If he could make it down the path, I could make it back up.
He inhaled the chorizo I gave him then started digging at the soft dirt I had tamped down. My explanation about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act fell on deaf ears (can anteaters hear?), so I piled the biggest rocks I could find on top of the grave.
I guess I’ve seen too many old westerns because the sight of the rock pile put me in mind to make a crude cross from two limbs and stick it between the stones. Then it occurred to me that someone born here four or five hundred years before Columbus was unlikely to have been a Christian.
The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence Page 20
