The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe (8 page)

20

I
t was well after midnight when I spotted Susannah's Crown Vic on the shoulder of the dirt road south of La Reina.

On the one hand, it's a terrible place to be stranded. Even though Rio Arriba County covers over 5,000 square miles, its county seat, Tierra Amarilla, has only 700 residents and is not even incorporated as a town. There are no all-night convenience stores, no garages open after dark.

On the other hand, it's a good place to be stranded. The chances of anybody being on that dirt road in the wee hours of the night are one in a million. The odds against that one being a threat are even higher.

Abiquiú, the village where Georgia O'Keeffe spent the last thirty-five years of her life, is also in Rio Arriba County, about forty-five miles southeast of Tierra Amarilla. It's a bigger town—almost 1,000 people. Nothing open after dark.

You might die of loneliness, but not from violence.

It was not always so.

O'Keeffe had been in the county almost twenty years when the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, led by Reies Tijerina, raided the Rio Arriba County Courthouse. The Alianza claimed the land grants given to the original Spanish settlers of the area were valid under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico.

Tijerina's cause was probably just, but his actions were bizarre. In October of 1966, he and his group (mostly descendants of the original grant holders) occupied Echo Amphitheater Park in the Carson National Forest and proclaimed it the Republic of San Joaquín del Rio de Chama. They issued visas to the surprised tourists who stopped in. When forest rangers tried to remove the squatters, Tijerina arrested them. They were tried, convicted of trespassing, given suspended sentences and released without harm other than to their dignity.

Some of Tijerina's colleagues were arrested for this activity. The raid on the courthouse freed them and made Tijerina famous for fifteen minutes.

Imprisoned several times, he led a colorful and bizarre life. On the day in 1969 when Warren Burger was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Tijerina went to Washington to place him under citizen's arrest. Burger dodged the arrest by exiting out a back door.

Maybe growing up in a state colonized by Spain rather than England and by people who were granted land a century before the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock explains why I don't have any qualms about ignoring the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Politicians and bureaucrats back east are clueless about New Mexico. Trying to arrest them is charmingly quixotic, but I'll just stick to ignoring them.

I found Susannah on the hood of the Crown Vic gazing up at the heavens.

“What are those two?” she asked, pointing.

I arched my back and followed the line of her finger. “That one is Sirius.”

“It looks frivolous.”

“The one next to it is Canis Major.”

“They're so bright.”

“Yep. One of the best things about living here is the high altitude and dry air make you feel like you can reach up and grab a handful of stars. See that fainter line of stars below Canis Major running parallel to the horizon? The Navajo say those are the tracks of a celestial rabbit.”

“You don't even need a telescope out here.”

New Mexico has one of the strongest night-sky protection laws in the country. It helps in Albuquerque, but it isn't needed out here on a dirt road west of the Jemez Mountains, where it can seem like Thomas Edison was never born.

“What's wrong with your car?”

“It keeps stalling. I think the throttle position sensor is broken.”

“I don't know what that is, but obviously you can't fix it or you wouldn't have called me. Do you just want a ride back to Albuquerque or do you want me to tow your car back?”

“I'd rather tow it now than have you make another trip.”

We hooked my tow rope under the Crown Vic's bumper. I would have enjoyed her company, but she had to ride in her car and use the brakes to keep it from running into me when I slowed or stopped.

“Good thing the stars are so bright,” she said. “I'm not turning my headlights on. I don't want a dead battery on top of a dead sensor.”

Once we got rolling, it was all downhill, so the tug I felt was not Susannah's car. It was the memory of Sharice saying I had to give more thought to her virginity before—excuse the phrase—taking the plunge.

But why? The only answer I could come up with is that doing the deed carried a commitment of some sort. That conjured up my high school friend Naldo stammering and sweating as he explained that his cousin and her girlfriend from Portales were coming to Albuquerque because they wanted to have sex before they went to college, and was I interested in pairing with his cousin. I had only the vaguest idea about the mechanics of the operation, but what I lacked in experience I made up for in enthusiasm.

Our pooled money was just enough to cover dinner for four at La Hacienda and a room at a cheap hotel on Central. We flipped a coin. I got the room. He got the backseat of the car. His cousin—I feel bad that I can't remember her name—did not strike me as the sort of young woman who would drive two hundred miles to have sex with a stranger. We were both so nervous when I closed the door to the motel room that the floor was vibrating. We kissed awkwardly. Since my arms were already around her, I seized the moment to unzip her dress. She stepped back and let it fall to the floor.

I hadn't anticipated her full slip, which was like a second dress. She lay down on the bed. I removed my jacket and tie and lay beside her. I suspected that actually having sex would require shedding a lot more of our garments, but I took her dress and my jacket and tie as a good start.

We resumed kissing. My left hand groped awkwardly under her clothes. She let it roam around aimlessly for a moment, then gently pushed it away. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When you get married, do you want your wife to be a virgin?”

I'd never had a girlfriend, much less given thought to whom I might marry. What I
did
have an opinion about was my own sexual status. I was anxious
not
to be a virgin.

Her query seemed like a trick question to thwart my objective.

One of the drawbacks of insecurity is the tendency to overanalyze. She wouldn't have sex with me if I said yes because what I hoped to do with her would disqualify her from marrying anyone who gave the answer I gave. And she wouldn't have sex with me if I said no because she knew that's why I was there, and who wants to have sex with a liar?

So I fell back on the ploy of answering a question with a question. “When you get married, do you want your husband to be a virgin?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping for the best, “that's my answer too.”

It didn't work. We had a friendly conversation. We smooched a bit more. But she was unwilling to risk sex while the consequences of doing so were uncertain.

But we're not only in a new century, we're in a new millennium. The sexual revolution took place before I was even born. Sex won. Surely Sharice wasn't intimating that I had to make some sort of commitment before having sex with her. In the first place, I was already committed. In the second place …

I never got to the second place, because some idiot behind me started honking. A glance into the rearview mirror revealed the silhouette of a vehicle with no lights. Obviously a drunk or a runaway with no brakes—the guy was only a dozen feet behind me. I feared he was so out of control that he might rear-end me at any moment.

The Bronco began to buck. I looked ahead and saw I'd run onto the shoulder while looking into the mirror.

I managed to wrestle the Bronco back onto the road just in time to see the stop sign where the dirt road intersected the main highway. Slamming on the brakes catapulted me forward. After a loud crashing sound, I was thrust rearward as the out-of-control no-lights vehicle slammed into me. And had the nerve to keep honking.

Then I realized it was my own horn, jammed into the honk position by the force of the collision.

I know full well that after a collision, the drivers of the cars involved are supposed to pull off the road, call the police and wait until an officer arrives.

I wondered if there were an exception in cases where the person who ran into you might be a crazed druggie. I was about to floor the accelerator and race to the next town, horn blaring, when the strangest thing happened.

Susannah stepped out of the car that had rammed me.

21

W
e didn't get back to Albuquerque until six in the morning, so I was not happy when Detective Whit Fletcher banged on my door at eight.

“You look like hell, Hubert.”

“It's Sunday morning, Whit. I normally sleep late on Sundays.”

“You sleep late every morning. I reckon you musta just got home after spending the night with that colored woman you been dating.”

“Jeez, Whit. Saying something like that could get you kicked off the force.”

“What's wrong with it? Even those liberals on public radio call them
women of color
.”

“
Woman of color
and
colored woman
are completely different.”

“Yeah, the words are in a different order. Big deal. I remember when
black
was an insult. I don't try too hard to keep up with what's politically correct. Which I guess makes me the wrong guy to have to tell you the bad news. I'll just give it to you straight—Carl Wilkes was shot to death yesterday.”

“I didn't do it.”

“I know that, Hubert.”

“Yeah, and you knew it when you arrested me last year.”

“There was a warrant. I was just doing my duty. But no one is accusing you this time.”

I know it doesn't reflect well on my character that my first thought on hearing that Carl was dead was selfish—hoping I wasn't a suspect. But I had a legitimate reason to be worried. When I've been accused of murder—which is less often than Whitey Bulger but more often than the average citizen—it's always Fletcher who breaks the news.

In a way, that's good. He knows I'm not capable of murder, and he's helped me exonerate myself. Whit and I have also shared a few bucks that we came by in unorthodox ways. Like the time a pot that was evidence in a crime found its way into my shop and we split the sales price. The crime in question was the murder of the pot's owner, who had no heirs, and Whit figured it was an inefficient use of resources to leave a valuable Anasazi in the evidence locker. He's otherwise a good cop and cares more about murderers than he does about pot thieves.

“You aren't a suspect. You ain't even a person of interest.” He laughed derisively at the phrase. “What I want is help. You're the only person we know who knew him. Did he have any enemies you know about, stuff like that?”

“He never mentioned any enemies.”

“You talk to him lately?”

“Yeah. He wanted me to get him a certain kind of pot. I was working on it.”

“How much was he going to pay for it?”

“Thirty thousand.”

He whistled in appreciation. “Maybe you should keep working on getting that pot.”

“It won't do me much good now that Carl is dead. He never told me who his buyer was.”

“'Course not. Probably afraid you might cut out the middleman. But my investigation might turn up the name of the buyer. I could share that information with you for a cut of the proceeds.”

“Be careful. The buyer might be the murderer.”

“You'd make a lousy cop, Hubert. If the buyer was gonna kill Wilkes, he would've done it
after
he got the pot.”

That made sense, of course, but the murder could still be related somehow to the Tompiro pot deal, and that made me nervous.

After Whit left, my thoughts turned belatedly to Carl's death. Should I feel guilty that my initial reaction was concern over whether I was a suspect? That I didn't think to ask about services? That I didn't know whether he had family?

In my first lesson with Martin, I directed him to draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then add a dot anywhere away from the line.

“How many lines can pass through the dot and be parallel to the line?” I asked him.

Remember, he was fourteen years old. He probably had the rudiments of plane geometry before he dropped out of school, so he knew what parallel meant, but I doubt his seventh-grade geometry teacher dealt with the subtleties of Euclid.

“Just one,” he said.

“How did you come to that answer?”

He looked at the paper rather than at me as he explained. “I imagined a parallel line through the dot. I could see that if you rotate it in either direction it wouldn't be parallel.”

He was right, of course. Euclid's famous Fifth Postulate, the one Martin could see was true, is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. But it cannot be proved. That's why Euclid called it a postulate—a starting point that you accept as true because it's so obvious.

Why am I nattering along about the Fifth Postulate and what has it to do with Carl Wilkes's death? Well, there is a similar postulate about death. When someone you know dies, you need to
do something
. That's just as obvious to me as Euclid's postulate. And just as impossible to prove.

What I
don't
know is what to do. Send flowers? Light a candle? Make a donation to the deceased's favorite charity?

I usually end up doing whatever everyone else is doing because not doing so seems disrespectful. If there's a funeral, I go. If there's a memorial service, I go. If there's a dispersal of ashes, I go. I even attended an event where everyone was required to compose a spontaneous haiku in honor of the dearly departed, and I managed to both come up with a haiku and keep a straight face.

I'd had two hours of sleep. Thinking about Carl's murder and death in general was depressing me. I put my
CLOSED FOR THE DAY
sign on the door and went back to bed.