The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (Pot Thief Mysteries)

by J. Michael Orenduff

  “I told you about that. I was probing with my rebar and—”

  “But I assumed it just touched his hand. I didn’t think it made a hole.”

  I remembered I hadn’t told her that part in detail because it was so disagreeable, and I was ashamed of it to boot.

  “I didn’t think I had pushed hard enough to penetrate a hand. You know how careful I am. I’d feel awful if I broke a piece of ancient pottery. So I was shocked when I grasped the hand and felt a hole.”

  “Where was the hole?”

  You’ve probably already figured out where this is headed, but I was still in a fog.

  Her question seemed odd. “Like I said, it was in his hand.”

  “But where in his hand?”

  “I didn’t look. As soon as I realized it was a hand, I dropped it like a burning coal.”

  The look in her eyes was beginning to worry me. Her stare made me feel like there was something spooky about me.

  She spoke slowly. “A thousand-year-old corpse can’t have a hole in its hand. It’s nothing but a skeleton.”

  My own hand went to my mouth. The dolmades casserole was threatening to make an unscheduled and highly unpleasant public appearance. I swallowed hard.

  After the grape leaf concoction settled down, I drank some of my margarita.

  “I need one with more tequila in it,” I said and signaled for a refill.

  11

  “I can’t believe you didn’t realize the hand had flesh on it.”

  “I told you I dropped it like a hot coal. It was a dark night, and the hand had cold hard fingers. I didn’t stop to ask myself whether they were plain bone or bone with dried flesh on them.”

  “But what about the hole?”

  “It was in the ground,” I said, hoping to lighten the conversation.

  She rolled her eyes. “The hole in the hand.”

  “It must have been in the palm.”

  “Jeez, Hubert. How can you drop a hand like a hot coal and still have felt both the fingers and the palm?”

  “It was like an accidental handshake. When I reached into the excavation, his fingers slid along mine and mine along his. Except for my middle finger that caught in the hole.”

  “I guess I can see why you didn’t know if the fingers were just bone, but didn’t it dawn on you that the palm didn’t feel like a skeleton?”

  “How would I know what a skeleton palm feels like?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t feel like a normal one.”

  I had to admit she might be right. If so, that meant I might not have violated the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. If the body was not ancient, it may not have been a Native American. The guy I thought had eaten coyotes and gophers may have had a burger and fries for his last meal.

  But who was it? And what era did he come from?

  The same questions were occurring to Susannah. “How long does it take the flesh to rot off a buried body?” she asked.

  “Can we change the subject, please? I want to forget the dead body, not analyze its decomposition.”

  The forced remembrance of unearthing a corpse had my stomach churning, but the fresh margarita was moderating my anxiety.

  “You can’t forget it, Hubert. It may be a murder victim. You have to report it to the police.”

  Here we go again, I thought to myself. She wants to turn this into a murder mystery.

  “The guy I found was not murdered, Susannah. A murderer would have to be crazy to drag a dead body down those steep switchbacks and along the narrow ledge to bury it in a ruin. It would be easier and safer just to throw the body into the gorge.”

  “Someone might find it in the gorge.”

  “So what? The corpse isn’t going to sit up and announce who killed it.”

  Her big brown eyes lit up. “A bullet hole! That’s what the hole was – a bullet hole.”

  “A bullet through the hand isn’t fatal.”

  “That’s just the first bullet, Hubie. If you read more murder mysteries, you’d know that. When the murderer aims his gun, the victim’s natural response is to stick up his hand in self defense.”

  She illustrated by extended her arm out in front of her, palm forward. I suppose the feigned fright on her face was to add a dash of drama.

  “It’s the second bullet that kills. If your digging had been a foot or two in a different direction, you might have felt a hole in his chest instead of his hand.”

  “Gee, I guess I should feel lucky I only poked a hole in his hand instead of driving the rebar through his heart like I was trying to kill a vampire.”

  “Sarcasm won’t help, Hubert.”

  I sighed. “I wish it were a bullet hole. Then I wouldn’t feel so bad about what happened. But it wasn’t a bullet hole. It was the same diameter as my rebar. Face it – I poked a hole in a dead body.”

  “You must have dropped that hand like a luke-warm coal instead of a hot one, Hubert. You not only felt the fingers and the palm, you also measured the diameter of the hole.”

  “I didn’t measure it. My middle finger fit in it, and my middle finger is about the diameter of the rebar.”

  “But you were pushing the rebar gently.”

  “Like I always do.”

  “So how could it poke a hole?”

  I took another sip of my drink. I didn’t want this one to get watered down like the first one.

  “Okay,” I relented. “Maybe the rebar didn’t make the hole. But I don’t think a bullet made it either.”

  “What, it was a birth defect?”

  “Maybe it was one of those piercings young people seem so fond of these days. Maybe there was a tattoo around the edge of it. Who knows?”

  “I do. It was a bullet hole because your rebar couldn’t punch a hole in a skeleton.”

  “Maybe it could. I remember seeing a mummy in the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University. It still had skin on it, and it looked paper thin and brittle.”

  “Did the palm you touched feel brittle?”

  “It didn’t occur to me to check whether he needed some Jergens. And it’s not my problem.”

  “Sorry, Hubie, but it is your problem. You found a modern dead person, not an ancient mummy. You have to report it to the police.”

  Congress may have labeled me a pot thief, but I always try to do the right thing. If it was a modern person – murdered or not – I had a duty to tell someone. But I still thought it was one of the ancient ones. It just didn’t make sense that a modern person would be buried that deep in that location. Unless…

  “Maybe he was officially buried there,” I blurted out.

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe he was an Indian who felt a special kinship with that place and requested to be buried there.”

  “That is so lame. You’ll come up with any excuse to avoid telling the police.”

  “There’s no reason to tell them if it was a planned burial.”

  “Who gets buried in an ancient cliff dwelling?”

  “People specify all sorts of weird places to be buried. Some get buried in a pet cemetery next to their cat or dog. A Beverly Hills woman named Ilene West was buried in her powder blue Ferrari. Her will specified that the seat be reclined to a comfortable angle.”

  “Well she wouldn’t want to spend eternity with the seat at an uncomfortable angle, would she? But that’s Beverly Hills. We’re talking about the real world here.”

  “No, Suze, we’re talking about New Mexico. Weird things happen here, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, Carrizozo passed an ordinance making it illegal for a female to appear unshaven in public. And don’t forget about the aliens in Roswell.”

  “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  “I’ve been reading all about our state because it’s the centennial year.”

  She shook her head. “Let’s get back to the subject. Are you going to tell the police about finding the dead guy?”

  “
I’ll send them an anonymous letter telling them exactly where the body is. They can dig it up and do whatever they need to do.”

  She was shaking her head while I was talking. “Not good enough. They’ll need to question you.”

  “No they won’t. I’ll include everything in the letter.”

  “You don’t even know what everything is. They may have questions that wouldn’t occur to you to answer. You have to do this in person.”

  “You can be very irritating, you know that?”

  She gave me another rancher-girl smile. “What else are good friends for?”

  “Going to the police will get me in trouble.”

  “Because you were breaking the Archaeological Resources Protection Act when you found the body.”

  I nodded.

  “How much trouble can that be? You didn’t carry anything away.”

  “Actually, I did. I found a shard before I found the dead guy.”

  “Nobody cares about shards, Hubie. Our sheep and cattle tromp over them every day. The whole state is littered with them.”

  “You know I agree with you, Suze, but the Feds don’t look at it that way.”

  “So don’t say anything about the shard. No one but me knows you took it.”

  I shook my head. “Two other people know – Dr. Fred Koehler and Alonso Castillo Maldonado.”

  “Why would you tell the doctor and his hunting guide you took a shard?”

  “I didn’t tell them. It was sticking out of my pocket, remember?”

  “You think they even noticed?”

  “Castillo was staring at me.”

  “What about the doctor?”

  “No, he wasn’t staring at the doctor.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know if Koehler noticed the shard, but we were together in the front seat of his rental car for three hours and in my house for another hour while he set my ankle. Incidentally, he’s a big fan of Billy the Kid and has read everything ever written about him.”

  “Well even if he did see the shard, he’s back home now. Do you think Castillo was staring at the shard because he’s an Indian and was upset that you had it?”

  “I don’t think he’s an Indian. He had a thick beard. And I don’t know for sure that it was the shard he was staring at. Maybe he just liked my shirt with the button-flap pockets.”

  “I don’t think it matters, Hubie. How would the Feds know to ask Castillo whether you took anything? They won’t even know you two ever met.”

  She was right, of course. But I still had a problem. “Just the digging is illegal even if you don’t find anything. And the punishment for first-time offenders is a fine of up to $20,000 and a prison term of up to a year.”

  “It might be worse for you because you aren’t a first-time offender.”

  “Actually, I’d be considered one because I’ve never been caught.”

  I thought about the rest of the law – I know it well – and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “ARPA also allows the Feds to confiscate any vehicles used in the violation. Maybe I could strike a plea bargain with them to just take the Bronco and not give me a prison term.”

  “But the Bronco is gone.”

  “Precisely. If they can find it, they can have it.”

  12

  I was missing my mother.

  There, I said it. It’s not that easy for a guy to do. Sentiment is soluble in testosterone.

  She passed away on the last day of the twentieth century. Mom was an idealistic person who devoted much of her considerable energy to promoting civility. She was in poor health the last year of her life, but I like to think she chose to die on December 31st, 1999 because she didn’t want to know what the new millennium would bring.

  I’m fortunate to have a sort of second mother, a nanny who arrived in the Schuze household the day my mother brought me home from the maternity ward. I learned Spanish from Consuela, not by lessons but by the method children naturally learn a language, having her speak to me in that tongue from the time I was an infant. My mother was happy I grew up bilingual even though she herself never made any attempt to learn Spanish.

  Consuela left to get married the year I started college, and she and Emilio eventually ended up living in Albuquerque’s South Valley in a modest adobe home surrounded by pecan trees. The urban sprawl has almost reached them, but for now it remains a pastoral setting.

  Emilio and Consuela have one daughter, Ninfa, who is now short one kidney because she was the donor for her mother’s recent transplant. I had volunteered to be the donor but neither my blood nor my tissue samples were a match.

  But my wallet was. The money I paid for the ‘patient responsibility’ portion of the bill would have come in handy now that I was broke, but it was money well spent.

  And money neither Emilio nor Consuela knew I spent. They think my parents provided them with health insurance. And I guess in a way they did – me. So when someone criticizes what I do for a living, it doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I use my income from purloined pots to buy Ferraris and Rolexes.

  No big sacrifice. I’d be afraid to drive a Ferrari and I don’t care what time it is.

  I was under the pecan trees on Saturday morning drinking coffee and eating marranitos, spicy little gingerbread pigs. These pigs are perfectly kosher. It is their shape, not their ingredients, that give rise to the name. The scent of the spices from Consuela’s kitchen tugged me back to my childhood.

  “I will bring more marranitos,” Consuela said, starting to rise from her chair.

  I raised a hand like a white flag. “Gracias, pero no. I’ve had too many already.”

  “But you are too skinny.”

  She thinks a man in his forties should have a bulge here and there, a sign of health and contentment. I had looked that way before venturing out to the Rio Doloroso, but I’d lost four pounds before I was rescued.

  Then I gained twice that much in the first hour after I got home.

  That was because Dr. Koehler put an eight pound cast on my ankle. I figured dragging that weight around would help me lose more weight. And I was also cutting back on the margaritas.

  Consuela subscribes to the dicho that a good husband should be feo, formal y fuerte. Although the literal meaning is ugly, formal and strong, what those words mean in the dicho is more like masculine, stable and stalwart, an exact description of Emilio.

  I usually get all the exercise I need by walking, but I had used city buses for this visit, the number 54 from downtown south on 4th, right on Bridge, across the river and south on Coors. I changed to the 155 at the bus stop near the intersection with Arenal and continued even further south almost to Gun Club Road.

  Emilio met me at the road, and I hobbled down the dirt lane with my rental crutches and his assistance. Tristan was right. I had to buy a vehicle.

  I had spent the night wrestling with my conscience instead of sleeping. Should I do nothing? I didn’t think the dead guy was modern, and I certainly didn’t think he’d been murdered.

  But I couldn’t be sure.

  So why not just send an anonymous letter? Susannah’s argument that I might leave something out was not convincing. Once the police dug the guy up, they could find out everything they needed to know.

  Maybe.

  The only thing I was certain about was I didn’t want to go to prison.

  Sitting under the trees with the sun just starting to peek over the Sandias, the smell of irrigated soil in the air and a warm marranito in my hand was just what I needed to relax. And maybe get some advice.

  “Your leg, it is broken?” asked Emilio.

  “Only sprained.”

  “Sprained?”

  “Esguince.”

  “Ah. Is worse than broken.”

  “I never see you sunburned before,” said Consuela.

  So I told them about my adventure on the Rio Doloroso.

  When I got to the part about the dead person, Consuela c
rossed herself and said, “This is very sad. He is forever alone.”

  “I guess all dead people are alone,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. We visit them each year on El día de los muertos. We clean and decorate the graves and bring ofrendas such as dulces, tequila and of course pan de muerto and cempasúchil.”

  “You know what is cempasúchil, Huberto?” Emilio asked.

  “Claro. It was originally a wreath of twenty flowers that we call marigolds in English. The Aztecs called them the flowers of death.”

  “Bravo,” he said and patted my shoulder.

  Consuela said, “Someone must move this man so that his family can visit him.”

  I was afraid I knew who that someone would be. As unsavory as the idea was to me, only one line of action satisfied my conscience. I had to return to the cliff dwelling and look at that hand. If it was the hand of a prehistoric person, I would leave him to rest in peace. He had no family who would visit.

  If it was a contemporary corpse, I would go to the police in person.

  It was risky business. Unless I bought another vehicle with a winch and repeated my rope trick, I’d have to wind down those switchbacks and creep along the precipice, a terrifying prospect. I’d have to dig in a grave and examine the hand of a dead person close enough to be sure if it was ancient or modern. And finally, I’d be risking a prison term.

  I didn’t think it would come to that. After all, I would surely get some credit for reporting the body. And I hadn’t taken anything except the shard which only Koehler and Castillo knew about, and neither of them would know I had gone to the police. But prison was a possibility.

  Although I decided that doing the right thing was worth facing my fear of heights, breaking my code of never digging in a grave and even going to prison, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that my motivation was totally pure and noble.

  There was also an upside.

  If I was going to put fear, principle and prison on the line, I figured I might as well do a little prospecting before I dug up the hand.

  13

  Clambering onto the bus back to town with crutches was awkward, but the riders were understanding and friendly, so once I was aboard, I enjoyed the ride.