The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing

by J. Michael Orenduff

  Then she gave me the Holy Grail. A sticker for the Bronco which entitled me to park in the space reserved for the head of the art department.

  The main door to the Art Building is open. I walk to the department head’s office and try the knob. It’s locked. The key slides in easily. I crack the door open with trepidation. And my right hand.

  Of course the blood has been cleaned off the wall behind the desk. The desk chair is new. The old one probably broke when both Milton Shorter and it were propelled backwards by the shot that killed him. Or maybe it was blood-stained and harder to clean than a wall. Everything else is just as I remember it, including the aircraft carrier of a desk.

  It’s just a place, I tell myself. It has nothing to do with what happened in it.

  Then I remember a passage from The House at Otowi Bridge:

  During the centuries of the Crusades in Europe, the time of the great khans in Asia, through the days when Columbus struggled for ships and money to sail west to the Orient, Indians were living in settled communities among these canyons and mesas. When the Spaniards came in the sixteenth century they found the villages deserted. The dwellings had fallen into mounds of stone. The sacred kivas were open to the sun and rain. No one knew what had become of the ancient inhabitants. Perhaps drought drove them away. Perhaps they felt their gods had failed them, or that they had failed their gods. Some of the Indians living along the Rio Grande claim them as their ancestors, but no one has been able to make the broken pieces of the puzzle fit together. A few years ago, returning for a nostalgic visit to scenes of my own childhood, I slept for a night on the ground below Tsirege, one of the largest of the ancient villages. The word means Place of the Bird People. Carried over into Spanish as Pajarito, “little bird,” it became the name by which the whole plateau is known. Long ago, for two magic years, my restless father managed a dude-ranch in Pajarito Canyon, two miles above the now-forbidding fence. When I was a child of twelve, I used to ride my barebacked horse to Tsirege and spend hours wondering about the vanished people who had chosen to build their homes in situations of such extraordinary beauty. I remember nothing so still as the silence around that mesa.

  I know exactly how she felt alone atop that mesa. There is nothing so quiet as a desert at night, especially when a human presence keeps the nocturnal denizens in the shadows. The people who made the pots I dig for are also there, hidden by time rather than shadow. They inhabited this land before Europe knew it existed. Cynics would call it a rationalization, but I think they want me to find their pots, to bring their creations back to the world of the living.

  Milton Shorter is not in this office the way the Bird People were on that mesa for Peggy Pond Church or the Anasazi potters are in the desert for me. Maybe because Shorter, even though now deceased, belongs to the present. Maybe because it was just an office, not a home, much less a village.

  I didn’t know if I would be able to use this office, didn’t know how strong the flashbacks might be. I sit on the new chair. Then I stand and adjust it upwards so that I can actually get my arms on the desktop.

  I open the “stats and data” folder and begin to study it. And eventually realize that my belief that I’m totally unqualified to be department head is wrong. I abandoned my math major because everyone told me there were no jobs for people with a B.S. in math. I switched to accounting and worked as an accountant for a few years until the boredom got to me. The people who advised me to study accounting were well-intentioned. They assumed accounting is like math.

  It isn’t. Accounting is not about numbers. It is about rules, categories, and procedures. And all the material in the manila folders looks like accounting. The only difference is the things being manipulated are not debits, credits, profits and losses. They are enrollment numbers, class sizes, grade point averages, and room schedules.

  I might be able to do this.

  Chapter 12

  Sharice turned from the kitchen counter where she was chopping something and said, “I thought you’d be back early.”

  “So did I. But it took most of the day to do the paperwork.”

  “Did you go to your new office?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “A bit eerie, but not as bad as I anticipated. I think I can work in it. What are you preparing?”

  “Something for both of us, Quebecois and New Mexican. I’m calling it Poutine de yucca.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Okay, shall I pour the Gruet?”

  “Let’s wait for Charles. He called and asked if he could come by this evening, and I said yes. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. Maybe he’ll tell me why he wanted a DNA sample.”

  Benz’ ears twitched, and he walked to the door just before the bell rang. I opened the door and told Charles our cat knew he was outside the door.

  “Yeah, I heard his claws tapping the concrete floor,” he said.

  I didn’t know whether he was kidding. Charles Webbe is the most alert human I’ve even been around.

  Sharice filled three coupes and placed a bowl of candied pecans on the coffee table.

  After a bit of small talk, Charles got to the purpose of his visit. “The bureau doesn’t investigate murders unless they are linked to interstate crime or involve federal matters such as sedition or hate crimes. Since we don’t know the identity of the person murdered in the Old Town Plaza, there’s no reason for us to be involved at this point. But we are informally assisting the Albuquerque Police Department by using our facial recognition software. Do you know about that technology?”

  “The most recent technology I’m aware of is the wheel.”

  He laughed and said, “That must be a potter’s joke. Facial recognition is a method of recognizing a human face. A facial recognition system creates a geometric map of your face from a photograph or video. It stores that map and then when shown another picture of you, it knows it’s you.”

  “Humans are already pretty good at recognizing faces. Why do we need computers to do it?”

  “Because although humans see thousands of faces every month, they don’t remember most of them. And even the ones they do remember, they usually can’t identify. So you see a guy with widely-spaced eyes and a turned up nose. I show you a picture of him later, and you say, ‘Yeah, I saw him walking down the street’. Doesn’t help me much. But I show that picture to our software and it pulls up other pictures of him. And in many cases, it has a name to go with the face.”

  Sharice frowned and asked how that was possible.

  “Well, one example is if you’ve ever flown, we have your name and picture in the system.”

  “They take pictures of everyone going through the security check?” she guessed.

  “Video actually. And because they also have your names in the order you entered—remember you have to show your ID and boarding pass—they can pair every face with a name.”

  “And I’m guessing the same could be said of anyone who’s ever gone into a bank,” I said, remembering the picture of me in mine.

  He nodded.

  “What if the bank cared about the privacy of its customers and didn’t want to do that?” Sharice asked.

  “It’s called the FDIC. No bank can operate without its approval, and all banks have to follow its rules.”

  “Sounds like Orwell’s 1984.”

  “Except in that story it was Big Brother—the government. Today the private uses of facial recognition software are even larger than what the government does.”

  “Private companies can do that?”

  “Can and do. Aggressively. Apple uses facial recognition to unlock its iPhone X and XS. Some colleges use facial recognition software to take roll in classes. Facebook uses it when you upload a photo to its platform. They ask if you want to tag people in your photos. If you say
yes, it creates a link to their profiles. And here’s the one I love—churches have used facial recognition to scan their congregations to see who is attending.”

  Sharice said, “You have got to be kidding. Churches spy on their own members?”

  “Guess they just want to know who the true believers are,” Charles said.

  To which I replied, “Being in church doesn’t make you a true believer any more than being in a garage makes you an automobile.”

  Sharice asked him if every person’s face is unique like his or her fingerprints.

  “Almost. Facial recognition software can’t distinguish identical twins, but other than that, it is amazingly accurate. But not completely. Just like any software, it’s only as good as the info you feed into it. So, for example, it may not correctly match a blurred photograph or one taken from a strange angle, but it’s getting better and better and use of the technology is exploding. The Bureau has over five hundred million individuals in our facial recognition software.”

  “That’s more than the U.S. population.”

  “Yes. And we have good reason to track people other than citizens.”

  While Charles and Sharice were discussing the millions of facial images, I was thinking about the two he had of me. “So I’m obviously in the system. But how did that lead to a request for my DNA.”

  He hesitated for a few seconds then said, “When we ran the picture of the victim through our software, it spit back pictures of you.”

  I heard Sharice’s sudden intake of air and saw her turn to face me.

  I said, “The facial recognition thought it was me?”

  “No. It had no exact matches, so it gave us the closest ones.”

  “And?”

  He hesitated a moment before speaking. “You and he are close relatives.”

  No wonder he looked familiar, I thought to myself. But if we look so alike, why didn’t I notice? After a few moments thinking about it, I thought I had an explanation. Then I said to Charles, “You say facial recognition is not perfect. How about DNA comparisons.”

  “Virtually foolproof. I suppose a technician might accidentally mislabel a sample, but short of that, if a DNA comparison shows two people are close relatives, then they are.”

  “Define close.”

  “The lab woman who ran the test said you and the victim share about twenty-five percent of your DNA. So genetically, the victim would have to be one of your grandparents, an aunt or uncle, a niece or nephew, or a partial sibling.”

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Won’t know until we ID him. You saw him. How old would you guess he is?”

  “I glanced at him for about five seconds, and I wasn’t trying to determine his age, but he certainly wasn’t old enough to be one of my grandparents. Maybe around my age or younger. He’s not an aunt or niece because he’s male. And I’m an only child, so Gurney Guy is not my sibling, partial or otherwise.”

  Sharice said, “Gurney Guy?”

  “Susannah thought it was disrespectful to keep calling him the dead guy, so Martin dubbed him Gurney Guy.”

  She looked at Charles and said, “They’d probably had several Margaritas.”

  Charles smiled and said, “Tell me about your family tree.”

  “Like me, my father was also an only child, so Gurney Guy can’t be from his side of the family. My mother had one sister who had one daughter who had one son. You’ve met Tristan. He calls me his uncle and I call him my nephew, but technically, he is my first cousin once removed. But he is alive and well. So there has to be a mistake in the DNA test.”

  Charles shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

  Then he was silent for a moment.

  Sharice moved closer to me and took my hand.

  Charles said, “There are other possibilities, scenarios you will dislike. So keep in mind that I’m not suggesting that any of these scenarios are factual.”

  I nodded and he proceeded. “Either of your parents could have had a child you didn’t know about. If your mother had a child, she might have put the child up for adoption. If such a thing did happen, then obviously she decided it was better for you not to know about it. It may be that your father also didn’t know about it. Or perhaps your father got a woman pregnant at some point. The bottom line is you may have a partial sibling you never knew.”

  “I hope I don’t have a partial sibling.”

  “It’s only a possibility,” Charles reminded me.

  “How do we find out for sure?”

  “We put the Bureau on it,” he said and flashed a big smile. “We’re pretty good at finding things out.”

  “How would you discover whether I have an unknown sibling?”

  “Legwork. We’d do complete background checks on your parents, talk to everyone we can find who knew them, worked with them, etc. We’d examine birth records in the time span when your parents were of child-bearing age. It’s slow and methodical. But it usually works.”

  I ate a few sugared pecans and took a sip of my Gruet. Did I want the FBI snooping around in my parents’ pasts? Did I have any right to object? After all, if the FBI is the pot of snoopers, then I’m the black kettle. I unearth personal property of people long dead. And unlike the FBI, my snooping is not condoned by statute.

  But the people in whose past I intrude are nameless. They have no reputation to worry about, much less records of anything in their life. Except what they made. It’s all that is left of them. They want me to find it so that at least we know they lived and made things of beauty.

  Today everyone has a birth certificate, a Social Security card, and eventually a death certificate. Maybe after they get that last one, we should leave them alone.

  “What would be the point of finding out how I’m related to Gurney Guy?”

  “From your point of view or from law enforcement’s point of view?”

  “Start with law enforcement.”

  “Knowing who he is makes it a lot easier to find out who killed him. Unsolved murders make cops cranky.”

  ”Are there other ways to discover who he is?”

  “Yes, and the Albuquerque Police are pursuing those as we speak. Checking all the missing person reports, showing his picture to retailers who sell Ermenegildo Zegna suits and Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, things like that.”

  “Will that work?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Sharice asked me if I even wanted to know about the victim. She didn’t call him Gurney Guy.

  “I don’t know if I do or not. And even if I decide I would like to know more about him, I’m not sure that would be enough to justify prying into any secrets my parents may have had.”

  “We won’t do any background work on your parents without your consent,” said Charles. “If it were an FBI matter, that would be different. But at this point it’s a simple homicide and therefore a matter for the Albuquerque Police Department. And they lack the manpower, the expertise and the desire to do any background checks on your parents.”

  “So how will they solve the murder?” Sharice asked.

  “They might get lucky and get a tip. Or they might find something in the body that connects to a weapon, a small piece of it or a trace chemical connected to its manufacture, use, or cleaning.”

  Sharice piped up, “How about dental work? You could show his x-rays around to all the dental offices.”

  Charles chuckled and said, “We could deputize you to do that, but he never had any dental work. No implants, no bridges, not even a filling.”

  “Wow. About 92% of all Americans have fillings. He must have had a great dental hygienist,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  Turns out that poutine is a popular Canadian snack of French fries covered with cheese curds and brown gravy.

  I have no idea what curds looks like and have never heard
the word spoken except when it precedes and whey.

  Sharice substituted yucca for the potatoes, cotija cheese for the curds and tomatillo salsa for the gravy. The yucca fries were light and crisp, the cotija pleasingly granular and salty and the tomatillo salsa tart and spicy. And the dish was perfect with chilled Gruet Blanc de Noir.

  But then what isn’t?

  Sharice said, “I’m surprised you enjoyed the meal so much after hearing Charles’ bombshell.”

  “Can’t let a little thing like finding out you may have a brother that you saw only after he was dead spoil your appetite.”

  She stared at me. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I do. I’m a strong believer in not letting my appetite be spoiled.”

  She jabbed me in the ribs and said, “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, and you’re right. I don’t believe Gurney Guy is my brother.”

  “You think they made a mistake with the DNA?”

  “No. He looked like me, so we may be related. But he is not my brother because the timing doesn’t work. My parents had me later in life than usual. My mother was in her early forties and my father even older. Like most couples, they wanted children. But it took a long time to happen. And there wasn’t much they could do about it. Remember I was born in 1969 before various fertility methods became popular. My parents had probably given up hope. But fortunately for me, they hadn’t given up sex. Since I was a surprise baby, I can’t imagine my mother had a child before me. And if my father had a child with another woman before he met my mother, both my mother and I would have known about it. He was a stand-up guy; he would not have kept that secret from us.”

  “So who is … I don’t want to call him Gurney Guy; its sounds flippant.”

  “Then call him Floss Man. He had to be a diligent flosser to make it to forty or fifty or whatever age he was without a single cavity.”

  “Okay. So who is Floss Man?”

  “Well, one reason I didn’t freak out as much as I normally would is that I started thinking about who might be that close to me kinship-wise as soon as Charles said Floss Man and I are related. And the only possibility is that Floss Man is Tristan’s half-brother.”