The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey

by Orenduff, J. Michael;

  I smiled at him. “I’m going to ask a question you may not want to answer. Is seniority the only reason Hockley has the course instead of Jollo?”

  He smiled back at me. He picked up a pencil and wrote on a small pad. He held up the paper, which read, He is a better painter. Then he put the paper in his mouth and chewed on it. I thought he might complete the gag by swallowing it, but he took the chewed mass out and dropped it into the waste can.

  “Can’t be too careful,” he said.

  “What if you told her she can be the painting teacher as soon as her paintings start selling for ten thousand dollars?”

  “She would likely become even more difficult to deal with.” He thought for a moment and added, “If that is even possible. At any rate, she stayed so long that by the time I got back to the gallery to turn the camera on, some of the guests had already arrived. At that point, I didn’t regret not remembering. I didn’t think it mattered. It was only after Detective Fletcher questioned me that I understood the magnitude of my error. Fletcher believes someone went into the gallery and suffocated poor Ximena by cutting off her air supply. If I had done my duty, that would have been videoed and the murderer would be in custody.”

  I felt sorry for the guy. “You don’t know that,” I said, trying to console him. “The murderer might have been disguised. Or kept his back to the camera. Having the camera on wouldn’t guarantee his capture. And having it off won’t prevent it. Very few murders are caught on video, but the police still manage to find the murderer in most cases.”

  “I hope you’re right.” He was silent for a moment before asking if there was anything else I wanted to know about the security camera.

  “Can I see the video?”

  “Seeing as how Fletcher referred you to me, I don’t see why not.”

  He pushed some buttons on a remote and the monitor on the wall flickered slightly then showed Ximena and Alfred alone in the gallery talking. Then Shorter walked in and exchanged greetings with them. He retrieved a ladder from the closet and carried it close to the camera. He pulled a key ring from his pocket and started up the ladder. It was odd seeing his face get larger with each step.

  Then the screen went dark.

  After a second or two it comes on again. The early arrivers for the event are already there. I watched the top of Shorter’s head as he descended the ladder.

  “I don’t need to see the rest of it,” I said. No need to see myself “faint like a girl,” as Fletcher so delicately described it.

  Shorter nodded knowingly and hit the remote. The current feed from the gallery returned to the monitor. It showed the usual number of people in the gallery. None.

  We sat in silence for a few seconds.

  32

  I returned to Sprits in Clay and entered through the alley just in time to hear the bong that indicates a customer.

  That’s the problem with bongs. They can’t distinguish a customer from a homicide detective.

  “So she kicked you out,” said Whit Fletcher. “I coulda told you that would happen, Hubert. Dating a white guy was just a fling. Once she found out how the colored community felt about it, I figured you’d be out on your ear.” He pulled at the top of his right ear as if trying to align it with the left one. “She must like older men. First you and now a black guy who’s even older than you are.”

  “You went to her apartment?”

  “’Course I did. I was looking for you, and that’s where you been living.”

  The panic in my eyes must have prompted what he said next. “Don’t worry. I didn’t ask for you. Soon as I saw the black guy open the door, I knew the score. No sense letting the cat outta the bag.”

  “So you said nothing about me?”

  “What’d I just say? When I seen him at the door and Sharice there in the background, I showed ’em my shield and made up a story about a tip concerning a suspicious person hanging around the building.”

  “You lied to them?”

  “If you gave that story, you’d be lying. When I gave it, it was in the line of duty. To protect and serve.”

  “Who were you protecting?”

  “You, Hubert. You wouldn’t want the new boyfriend paying you an unwelcome visit, would you?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  He shook his head slowly. “The less you know the better. Why torture yourself thinking about her with another man?”

  “He’s not another man. He’s her father.”

  “Hmm. He don’t look like her. Big dude. Black as the ace of spades. Sharice is a wisp of a girl and medium-skinned. Must take after her mother. Maybe her mother was white.”

  I knew that wasn’t the case, because I had seen her picture. The only thing I knew about her mother was she was deceased. And for the first time—call me slow-witted if you want—I wondered if Sharice’s mother had died from breast cancer.

  “So he came to meet his daughter’s new boyfriend?”

  I didn’t want to discuss Sharice’s father with Whit, particularly the part about the promise. “He came for Thanksgiving.”

  “Kinda early, ain’t he?”

  “The Canadian Thanksgiving is this Monday.”

  “That a fact? Well, Hubert, I’m afraid you won’t be giving thanks for what I’m about to tell you. Maybe you better sit down.”

  33

  Susannah dropped her chip back into the bowl. “A straw? The prints they wanted to compare yours to were on a straw?”

  “No. Whit still won’t tell me where they found those first prints. Now they have a second set of prints.”

  “And they’re on a straw?”

  “Yeah. And both sets of prints are mine.”

  I’d headed to Dos Hermanas after Whit left at four thirty. I spent twenty minutes resisting the temptation to order a margarita. When Susannah arrived, I told her they found my prints on a straw while she was waving at Angie.

  Actually, they found my prints on the straw about two days before Susannah waved at Angie. Whit had come to tell me as soon as he was able and advised me to see my lawyer because he figured I was likely to be arrested.

  No, that’s not right either. My lawyer didn’t figure I’d be arrested. Whit did.

  I was so discombobulated by Whit’s news that even now I lose track of sequences and people in trying to recall it.

  “So exactly how many prints did you leave?” she asked after Angie brought the margaritas.

  “I don’t know. Here’s what I do know. They found one—”

  “Wait, let’s do this systematically. We can’t solve this thing unless we have all the clues lettered. Call the first set of prints Set A.”

  There’s no arguing with her when she wants to use what she calls her police procedural approach, and in this case, I needed a bit of organization anyway.

  “Okay. We don’t know anything about the prints in Set A except they’re connected with Ximena. They found Set B on a straw—”

  “No. Set B are the ones Whit made on Tuesday.”

  “We have to letter those too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. Set C were found on a straw. Which looked like bad news.”

  She turned up her palms. “So you used a straw because you don’t want your lips to touch a glass. All that proves is you’re finicky and … oh my God, it was a straw from Ximena’s nose.”

  I nodded.

  “How do they know it’s one of those straws?”

  “It had my prints on one end and Ximena’s nasal mucus on the other.”

  “They did a DNA match?”

  I nodded again.

  “You said you never touched anything in the gallery except maybe the walls and floor.”

  “Right. And I know for certain I never touched the straws in her nose. I never got closer than ten feet to Ximena in the gallery. I didn’t ev
en know it was Ximena until they took the plaster off and she toppled backward.”

  “So how do you explain the police having a straw with your prints on one end and Ximena’s nasal gunk on the other?”

  I smiled. “Easy. Junior Prather is trying to frame me.”

  “Yes!” She said excitedly. “Let me see your hands.”

  I held them up.

  “Shoot. You’re not missing a finger.”

  We’ve been friends so long that nothing she says surprises me.

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not in general, but it would have explained your prints on the straw.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How would it explain my prints on the straw?”

  “Because Prather could have put a print on the straw with your severed finger and you wouldn’t know about it.”

  “I think I would know about it if I had a severed finger. It’s not something I’d be likely to overlook.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Actually, I don’t. How could he make a print with a severed finger?”

  “Happens all the time. A detective named Keith Gamble had a case that turned on a print from a severed finger. Except in this case the finger was a thumb.”

  “Someone had a thumb growing where a finger should be?”

  “Of course not. The guy who had the thumb was Carson Reno, but it wasn’t his thumb. He got it from a delivery guy.”

  “So this guy named Reno cut off the thumb of a delivery guy?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The delivery guy just delivered it. He didn’t know it was a thumb because it was sealed in a package.”

  “Probably a good idea. Getting out of a UPS truck with a severed thumb in your hand would be bad for business.”

  “Probably. Anyway, the case had several murders and a bunch of prints and the murderer had cut the thumb off one of the victims and used it to leave a print.”

  I was surprised to hear myself saying, “I think I understand it now.”

  She picked up the chip she had dropped into the bowl, loaded it with salsa and nodded encouragingly.

  “The murderer kills someone on Monday and cuts off the thumb of the victim. Call the victim John Doe,” I said. “Then on Tuesday he kills Jane Doe. He uses the severed thumb to put John Doe’s thumbprint on the weapon hoping the police will think John Doe killed Jane Doe.”

  “How did you know one of the victims was a woman?”

  “A lucky guess?”

  “Admit it, you read the story.”

  “The story?”

  “Yeah, it’s called The Fingerprint Murders by Gerald Darnell, part of his Carson Reno Mystery Series.”

  “Ah. Well, just because it happened once in a book doesn’t mean it could happen in real life.”

  “It didn’t happen just once. In another case, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle met by chance at a spa in Germany. Doyle was sorting through letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes.”

  “People wrote letters to Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Sure. Elvis gets tons of fan letters every year.”

  “I imagine he does. But Elvis was a real person.”

  “And now he’s dead, which makes him fictional in real life.”

  I had no reply to that and took a sip of my margarita to brace myself for what I imagined was coming next.

  “Anyway,” she continued with gusto, “one of the letters addressed to Holmes contained a severed finger. Wilde and Doyle set out to discover who the finger belonged to, and they solve the mystery of where the finger came from, plus another murder that happens when they get to the Vatican.”

  I decided not to inquire about why and how Wilde and Doyle got from Germany to the Vatican and asked instead whether the two actually knew each other.

  “They did. They met by chance when J. M. Stoddart, the American who published Lippincott’s Magazine, went to England seeking writers. They were interviewed by him on the same evening and became friends.”

  “Stoddart must have had an eye for talent,” I said. “Can you imagine interviewing Oscar Wilde and Arthur Doyle on the same evening?”

  “Arthur Conan Doyle, Hubie. You have to use all three names.”

  “Why? I don’t call you Susannah Dolores Inchaustigui.”

  “That’s because Dolores is my middle name.”

  “And Conan was Doyle’s middle name.”

  “No. His middle name was Ignatius.”

  “Really? I never heard that before. Where did the Conan part come in?”

  “It must be one of those double-barrel English last names. Like Olivia Newton-John, Andrew Lloyd-Webber or Camilla Parker-Bowles.”

  “But it’s simply Arthur Conan Doyle, not Arthur Conan hyphen Doyle,” I said.

  “Well of course not,” she replied. “Who would name someone Hyphen?”

  I dropped it and moved back to Wilde, telling her he once visited New Mexico.

  “Where?” she asked. “Even better, why?”

  “He made a tour of the States in the late nineteenth century. He gave lectures in New York, Boston, San Francisco, all the places you might expect people to turn out for an English poet and writer. But one of his stops was in Leadville.”

  “Leadville’s not in New Mexico. It’s in Colorado.”

  “I know that. It was a raucous town with thirty thousand miners and a hundred saloons. For some unknown reason, it also had an impressive opera house, which may explain why Leadville got added to the itinerary. Wilde came out onstage in a purple Hungarian smoking jacket, knee breeches, silk stockings and diamond jewelry. Then he began his lecture, which was titled, ‘The Practical Application of the Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration with Observations on Dress and Personal Ornament.’”

  She shook her head. “To an audience of miners? Can you imagine what they thought of him?”

  “I don’t have to imagine it. He wrote about it. He said when he read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, they asked why he hadn’t brought Cellini with him. When he told them Cellini was dead, they asked who shot him.”

  “Well, at least they were interested enough to ask about Cellini.”

  “Yes, but the stagehands evidently decided Wilde was too ‘sissified’ and pushed him into the orchestra pit. Then they dragged him back up onstage and announced they were going to get him drunk then hand him over to the ministrations of a local lady of the evening to make a man out of him. Their plan was thwarted when he managed to drink them all under the table. When they passed out, his handlers spirited him south to Antonito, Colorado, where they boarded the Chili Line railroad to Santa Fe.”

  “The Chili Line?”

  “Great name, right? The little village of Tres Piedras north of Taos still has the water tower the train used to top off its boiler when it stopped there.”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Because you were trying to explain how my fingerprints got on the straw that was in Ximena’s nose, and you brought up the severed-finger thing.”

  “Oh, right. So how did your fingerprint get there?”

  “You’ll be proud of me, Suze. I solved the mystery. See, the important thing is not how my fingerprints got on that straw—it’s when. My fingerprints got on the straw on Friday, September third. That was the afternoon of the departmental meeting. Prather served tea in Styrofoam cups with straws in them. He collected them afterwards and must have saved the straw from my cup. He then inserted one end into Ximena’s nose, being careful not to smudge the other end, where my print was.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he killed Ximena. And then tried to blame it on me so that he wouldn’t be charged with murder.”

  “But why you?”

  “Two reasons. First, he doesn’t like me. He won’t even tal
k to me.”

  “But he does.”

  “Only because he has a strange concept of ‘not talking to.’”

  “And the second reason?”

  “I’m the only one who was expendable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re already fuming over the fact that Freddie’s position was not filled. If another art professor goes to prison, they’d have two empty slots. That would make art seem like a dying department. But losing a lowly adjunct is nothing.”

  “Why did he kill her?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I thought you solved the mystery.”

  “I solved the mystery of my prints being on the straw. I also figured out who did it. I have to let the police do something, so I’m leaving the motive question for them.”

  “You tell Fletcher that?”

  “Not in those words. But I did tell him I think Prather killed Ximena.”

  “He agreed?”

  I shook my head.

  “I bet he also didn’t buy your cockamamie story about the straw from the tea?”

  “Of course he bought it. It’s brilliant.”

  “More like bizarre. The police find your prints on a straw that was obviously in Ximena’s nose and they let you walk because you claim it must be a straw from a departmental meeting that was weeks ago? Why would Prather save the straw?”

  “I already told you—to frame me. And there’s something else. That’s the only straw in the universe that has my print on it, so it has to be the one from the departmental meeting.”

  “You never use straws?”

  “I drink coffee, tap water, Champagne, margaritas and beer. Which one of those would you put a straw in?”