The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (30 page)

It wasn’t
the electrical kind from the sky
. It was
the mental kind from your brain when the synapses line up and truth strikes you like a bolt
out of the
blue.

The pot Alvar sold me was not from that cliff dwelling high above the Rio Doloros
o
.

I’ve been studying pot designs for over twenty years. There was no way the people who produced that shard also produced that pot.
The designs were too different. To think they came from the same tribe would be like thinking Lew Wallace wrote
both
Ben-Hur
and
The Da
Vinci Code
.

I examined the Alvar pot closely.

I
paced the floor until a quarter to five
, no mean accomplishment with a cast on my foot. Then,
I started my walk to our watering hole.

“Alvar Nuñez is a fraud,” I said after
taking
the first sip of my margarita. “That pot he sold me didn’t come from the cliff dwelling.”

“How do you know?”
Susannah asked.

“It dtype">oesn’t match the shard I found there.”

“It doesn’t have to, does it? Not all pots made by the same tribe are alike.”

“
Right. B
ut there are certain consistencies in the designs, shapes and colors. Even casual collectors can tell the difference between a piece from Acoma and one from Kewa.”

“And the shard and the pot are that different?”

“Worlds apart.
”

“
Wait,
” she said excitedly,
”maybe the pot is from the cliff dwelling and it’s the shard that isn’t.”

I shook my head. “I dug up the shard myself, so I know it was from there.”

“You also dug up a hand
,
and it wasn’t from there.”

“Why would someone bury a shard there?”

“Maybe the dead guy had it on him when he was killed.”

Oh brother. “We don’t know for certain that
he
was murdered. An
d
even if he was, the shard is the ringer, not Alvar’
s
pot. I examined it closely after I realized how different it is from the shard. Not only didn’t his pot come from that cliff dwelling, I don’t
even
think it’s
Anasazi. I think it’s a very good fake.”

“Maybe it’s one of yours,” she said and laughed.

“I can’t believe I bought a fake.”

“I’m glad you did, Hubie. This could help us solve the mystery.”

“Which mystery is that, Suze? Who stole my Bronco? Who moved the body? What happened to my hat?”

“The first two. Forget the hat. Tell me everything Alvar said to you.”

I closed my eyes and tried
to remember our conversation
.

“He said he
got
the pot from
a teenager who said he found it in a cliff dwelling
. I asked him where, and he said at his house.
I said I meant where was the pot found, not where did he
get
it,
but
he ignored that question.
We looked at a similar partial pot I have priced at
three thousand.
He said he would take two thousand for his. I offered five
hundred
. H
e said if I gave him a thousand he
would
also tell me where the pot
was found.”

She chewed on that while I loaded a chip with salsa.

“So he asks for two thousand
. After you counter with
only five hundred
,
he goes all the way down to a thousand without further haggling. And he throws in the location of the
cliff
dwelling
even though he had
ignored your
earlier
request for the location.”

I nodded.

“So he doesn’t haggle much, takes
a
low price and throws in the location.
It’s obvious, Hubie. He wasn’
t there to sell a pot. He was
t
here to lure you to that cliff dwelling.”

I admit
ted
it made
some sofont>
sense, but there was a huge unanswered question.

“Why
?
”

“He wanted you to find the body.”

“Why?”

That one stumped her but not for long. “He’s the murderer and subconsciously wanted to be caught because he couldn’t handle the guilt.”

“Then why not just go to the police? Why involve me?”

She bit her lip. Then she said, “
Maybe his guilt is not about the murder. Maybe he thinks the victim had it coming. But he still feels guilty about burying
him
in an Anasazi site.”

“You’re striving.”

“Yeah, you’re right. How about this? Alvar is not the murderer, but he knows who is. He wants the guy caught.”

“Same issue. W
hy not just go to the police?
”

“I’ve got it!
You told me he lives in a tiny village. That means he knows everyone there.
The murderer is a da
ngerous guy. Alvar
is
afraid
if he goes to the police, the murderer will come after him. But if it looks like an accidental discovery, the murderer won’t connect it to Alvar.”

“I don’t know, Suze. Seems a bit far-fetched.”

“So maybe we don’t know the reason. But you admit it looks like Alvar wanted to lure
you
to that site.”

“I admit that could be the case
.”

“Then the best way to find out why he did it is to ask him.”

32

We left for La Reina the next morning.

The trip took us 3,000 feet up in elevation and 300 years back in time.

A primitive road snake
d
along a creek and eventually
up to the
spring which
was
its source. It was a good thing Susan
nah hadn’
t yet traded the truck back for he
r Crown Vic. That boat would
have struggled climbing
the dirt road to La Reina, a v
illage
time
has
forgotten.

The villagers seem
ed
to like it that way. Low adobes
were scattered around a
system of
acequias
that fed
level plots of corn, beans and chiles
and
small orchards of apples and apricots.
The road ended in a
placita
around which were clustered a bar
named
El Erupto del
Rey
, a general store, a gas station
,
a town hall, a hair salon, a grocery store, two
empty stores
and a church
,
the only building in town that wasn’t eroding.

The bar had booths against the front wall, tables in the center of the room
around an open area for dancing
and a bar along the back wall with a dozen stools. We sat on the stools and asked the kid behind the bar if they served food. He said they had
pizza,
hamburgers,
tacos and
chi
le stew
. Susannah ch
ose the hamburger.
The
smell of roasting chiles
hanging in
the air forced me to chance the stew.

The kid
threw a hamburger patty
on the grill along with the two halves of the bun face down. He spooned some stew from a crock-pot into a bowl. The crock-pot seemed out of place, but so did a
fifteen
-year-old barkeep.

“You want a beer?” he asked.

“You’re not old enough to serve beer.”

He shrugged. “There’s no one else here.”

“You have Corona?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, I’ll have one.”

He had a pleasant kid’s smile. “You
’re
not a policeman, are you?”

“I’m not.”

He opened my beer and Susanna
h’s Pepsi. He flipped the patty
, dressed the bun like he’
d
been working as a short-order cook for years and slid a standard hamburger onto the bar.

“I suppose you know everyone around here.” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m looking for a guy named Alvar Nuñez.”

He shook his head.

“You sure?” I asked.

“
There’s only eight
apellidos
–
family names
–
around here
“

Susannah shot me a glance at the word ‘
apellidos’.

“What are they?” I asked.

“
Zaragosa, Maldonado
,
Campos,
Castillo,
Padilla,
Gomez,
Medrano
and
Maestas.
”

“How
come you can list all the
names so easily?” Susannah
asked
him
.