The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey

by Orenduff, J. Michael;

  I waited in my studio until Sharice beckoned me to join them.

  I looked at Susannah. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Absolutely. How often does a girl get to have a free facial and solve a murder all at once?”

  I inserted two straws. I slathered alginate on her head. I applied layers of gauze and plaster until they reached what I judged to be the same thickness that had been on Ximena.

  We didn’t bother doing Susannah below the waist. The experiment didn’t require it, and having her sit on the table eliminated the need for an armature.

  Sharice went to work.

  I read War and Peace.

  Actually, I read The Journey Home by Edward Abbey. It only seemed like War and Peace because my best friend was encased in plaster for hours.

  When the hours finally came to an end, I stood up, faced Susannah’s plaster head and pinched both straws closed.

  There was a muted sound like someone clearing her throat in the next room. Then a louder rumble followed by a slight rise in her shoulders. Then the head rotated a millimeter to one side. Then back the same amount.

  A cracking sound was followed by her arms coming away from her side by an inch. Then another inch. They began to vibrate. More guttural noises. Louder at this point. A resounding crack was followed by a complete break in the plaster at her right elbow. Then it tore away at the shoulder as she reached up and swatted away my hands.

  She gripped her jaw and began to move it left and right. A crack formed where her mouth should be. It arched down like a sad face. She worked her fingers loose and stuck them into the crack. Then she pulled off most of the face plaster. She removed the protective discs from her eyes and looked at me.

  “Nothing to it.”

  “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks. That was the boringest time I ever spent. Is it too early for margaritas?”

  “You’re in luck. It’s just past noon.”

  “Pull the rest of the plaster off my arms, then help me stand up.”

  I did. She walked unsteadily into my bathroom. Pieces of plaster came flying out onto the floor. Those were flowed by clumps of gauze. Then I heard the door close and the shower come on.

  45

  Why did you run the shower so long?”

  “A lot of plaster washed down the drain. I wanted to make sure it was long gone and wouldn’t plug your sewer line.”

  “Thanks.”

  “On top of that, I kept finding pieces lodged in my hair.” She bent her head down. “You see any plaster in there?”

  “Your hair is so thick, there could be a plaster of Paris figurine in there without me seeing it.” I paused then said, “I feel really stupid.”

  “You shouldn’t. My hair really is that thick.”

  I shook my head. “What I feel stupid about is not realizing Ximena could have broken out of the plaster.”

  “Nobody realized it. Everyone just assumed she was a sitting duck. Er … standing duck? All the murderer had to do was just hold the straws shut for a few minutes while she suffocated.”

  “You didn’t assume it.”

  “I did when you first told me about it.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Her poems. They showed grit, pride. Someone who wrote like that would struggle. I imagined her in that plaster, flexing every muscle in her body. Then I suddenly realized we had no proof that plaster would be strong enough to keep you from flexing. So we needed to run an experiment to find out. And now we know I was right about her being poisoned.”

  “Because it takes at least three minutes of air deprivation before you pass out?”

  “Right. And it took me less than two minutes to swat your hands off the straws. But poison can act so quickly that you wouldn’t have time to struggle against the plaster.”

  “But the OMI ruled that Ximena died of suffocation. Maybe Ximena wasn’t strong enough to break the plaster. You’re a lot stronger than most women.”

  “I’m stronger than a lot of men too. And I didn’t have much adrenaline, because I knew you weren’t going to suffocate me. But Ximena would have been in full panic. She would have been fighting for survival.”

  “But what about the OMI’s finding?” I asked again.

  “Easy. It has to be a poison that mimics suffocation.”

  “Since you guessed cyanide, I suppose it mimics suffocation.”

  “Right. It prevents red blood cells from processing oxygen. The victim suffocates even though she’s got plenty of oxygen coming in. The effect on the red cells is almost instantaneous.”

  “But wouldn’t the OMI have been able to detect cyanide when he did the autopsy?”

  “You’d know the answer to that if you read murder mysteries. There was one by Agatha Christie called Sparkling Cyanide.”

  “Someone put cyanide in Champagne?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Well, of course it’s awful. Murder is never pleasant.”

  “I meant spoiling Champagne. I hope it wasn’t Gruet.”

  “Probably not. It was set in 1945. It starts when seven people go to dinner at a restaurant in London called Luxembourg.”

  “Or a restaurant in Luxembourg called London,” I said, trying to sound like Groucho Marx.

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Strangely, I did. And said so.

  “A character named Rosemary dies at the restaurant while dining with her husband and some of their friends. Months later, her husband, George, gets an anonymous letter claiming Rosemary was poisoned. The husband contacts all the people who were there the night Rosemary died and invites them to join him at the same restaurant exactly one year after the evening of his wife’s death. He hires an actress who looks like his wife and arranges for her to arrive a few minutes late and take the seat next to him.”

  “And he did that because?”

  “That’s obvious, Hubie. He expected the murderer to confess when he saw the ghost.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Doesn’t matter, because the actress didn’t show up. And George dies at the restaurant in the same manner as his wife—cyanide in his Champagne.”

  “Was this the beginning of the BYOB movement?”

  “No. But it was the beginning of a long tradition of poison in murder mysteries.”

  “Always cyanide?”

  “Of course not. There’s hemlock, of course.”

  “Made famous by Socrates.”

  “Right. And Aconite.”

  “Another famous victim—the emperor Claudius.”

  “And then there’s Mandrake.”

  “The magician?”

  “No, the poison. The plant bears edible fruit. But the roots are poisonous. Extracts from it are used today to remove warts.”

  “Can we change the subject?”

  “You don’t want to know about strychnine and arsenic?”

  “Not if I can help it. Remind me why we’re talking about this.”

  “Because you asked why the OMI didn’t find evidence of cyanide in Ximena. The answer is there are lots of poisons. So instead of running scores of tests, pathologists just test for things that the situation indicates might be possible. There was evidence of oxygen deprivation. She was encased in plaster with only straws to provide air. The obvious guess is someone pinched the straws closed.”

  “So now what?”

  “You tell Whit to tell the OMI to test for cyanide.”

  “I know I sometimes make fun of you for reading murder mysteries, but I have to admit you may have solved this one.”

  “Not really. Before our little experiment, we thought someone pinched off Ximena’s air supply. But we had no way of knowing who did it, since anyone could have gone in there
and done it. Now we know she was poisoned. But we still have no way of knowing who did it.”

  “Maybe we do. If it really was cyanide, the police might be able to find out if anyone who knew Ximena had access to cyanide.”

  “I suspect most people who knew her had access to cyanide.”

  “Why?”

  “She was an art student, Hubie. Cyanide is stored in the photography lab. It’s used as the fixing agent in the wet-plate collodion process for large-format photographs. And another cyanide compound is stored in the metals lab. It’s used in plating and finishing for metal jewelry and other sorts of metal artwork.”

  46

  Because we moved the cocktail hour up to just past noon, I was at a loss when Susannah left. It was too late for lunch. I decided the salsa and chips would have to tide me over until dinner.

  I returned to Spirits in Clay and relieved Glad. I took my position on the stool behind the counter hoping the crowd of Tuesday shoppers might be good for business.

  That hope became a reality when the first person through the door bought the Zia bird jar Glad had taken subject to my approval. The buyer bargained me down from the forty-five hundred I had it marked at to an even four thousand.

  Sometimes I go weeks without a sale. Now I had quadrupled my thousand dollars in just a few days. And I hadn’t even paid the thousand yet.

  I looked up at the sound of the bong to see Miss Gladys.

  “Is that smile for me or for this treat for your tummy?”

  I looked at the casserole dish. “You brought me lunch?”

  “Just because I have a fiancé doesn’t mean I can’t look after you from time to time,” she said. “But this isn’t lunch. It’s leftover dessert. But don’t let the word leftover fool you. It’s probably even better now that the flavors have melded.”

  I eyed the concoction warily. “What’s the name of this dish?” The names are often as bizarre as the dishes themselves.

  Her eyes actually twinkled. “It’s called the Next Best Thing to Robert Redford. When you taste it, you’ll understand why. It has a frozen graham-cracker crust, a stick of margarine, an eight-ounce package of Kraft light cream cheese, a cup of sugar and two packages of Jell-O instant pudding, one vanilla and one chocolate. You stir everything with a little cream and dump in into the crust. Bake it at three fifty for fifteen minutes, then top it off with a twelve-ounce tub of Cool Whip.”

  The growling you just heard was my stomach.

  “I think I’ll save it for after an evening meal when I can appreciate it fully.”

  47

  It was a brisk fall day with a light breeze and bright sun. Purple and orange deciduous trees dotted the Sandia Mountains, creating a patchwork with the green conifers. A dusting of snow along the ridge capped off the postcard vista.

  Even though the walk from Old Town to the campus is uphill and the fresh fall air was 10 percent automobile exhaust, I was in a great mood when I entered the pottery studio.

  Then I saw my students.

  If the old saying about misery is true, they would have loved company.

  “Why the long faces?”

  “They rejected us,” said Aleesha. “All of us.”

  “Who rejected you?”

  “The gallery committee. Everybody in this class submitted a piece for the student/faculty show, and they rejected all of them. It’s your fault.”

  I was stunned. Not by her allegation. I’d gotten used to that. But by the rejections. I know good pottery when I see it. Most of theirs were better than good. I couldn’t believe not even one of their pieces had been accepted.

  “It’s not his fault,” said Carly.

  Aleesha looked at me. “Was our work good enough to make the show?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She looked at Carly. “See what I mean? If the work is good enough, then it was rejected for some other reason. And the only other reason is because they’re mad at him for something. Telling us not to pay the lab fee. Taking us on unauthorized field trips.”

  “Maybe it’s because you filed an unjustified EEO complaint,” said Marlon.

  “What would you know about justification?” she shot back.

  Carly jumped in, “He treats you just like everyone else, Aleesha­. Better actually. Despite your constant complaining, he treated you the same way he treated the rest of us.”

  “That’s because he’s afraid of her,” said Apache.

  “No,” said Raúl, “he has nothing to be afraid of. He’s just an adjunct. It’s not like they’re going to fire him.”

  Bruce laughed and said, “He might want them to.”

  “It might be good if they fired him. He could file his own complaint,” said Alfred, “and claim he was discriminated against because he’s a straight white male.”

  “How you know he’s straight?” asked Aleesha.

  “I’ve seen him around town with his girlfriend. And, Aleesha­”—he put the outsides of his wrists on the two sides of his waist—“guess what, honey. She’s black.”

  Marlon laughed. “You dating a sister, Mr. Schuze?”

  “No. She’s an only child.”

  They all laughed at me.

  “This class is like a sitcom,” said Nathan, and they laughed some more.

  When the laughter died down, Raúl said, “We should fight this.”

  “Fight what?” I asked.

  “The rejection of our work.”

  “You can’t fight it,” said Aleesha. “The gallery committee picks which pieces get in, and that’s it. It’s not like the law”—she glared at Marlon—“where you can go the EEO office and right a wrong. There is no appeal.”

  “You’re right,” said Raúl. “We can’t change the committee, but we can embarrass them.”

  “How?”

  “By mounting our own show, a Salon des Refusés.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means exhibition of rejects.”

  Aleesha said, “That’s us, all right—rejects.”

  “And we are in good company,” said Raúl. “The first Salon des Refusés included Édouard Manet.”

  “Even I’ve heard of him,” said Mia.

  “Tell us about that,” I said to Raúl.

  “The Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris started sponsoring art exhibits in 1667. They were the most prestigious art show in the Western world. An artist who got a work into the show was virtually guaranteed a successful career. The members of the academy were very picky about what got into the show.”

  “Like the gallery committee,” said Aleesha.

  “Worse,” said Raúl. “At least our committee lets in contemporary and even edgy work. The academy accepted only art depicting traditional subjects painted realistically. But art cannot be frozen. By 1863, Impressionism was on the rise, and a central figure in the movement was Manet. The academy rejected his entry. He and the other rejects mounted their own exhibit in another wing of the building where the academy had their official show. A thousand visitors a day visited the Salon des Refusés, more than visited the official salon. Émile Zola reported that visitors pushed to get into the crowded Salon des Refusés to see Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe.”

  Aleesha said, “It’s one thing to have rejected works by Manet. But who’s going to want to see rejected works by Aleesha Jones?”

  “All the students,” said Apache. “What could appeal to the natural rebelliousness of students more than attending a show of pieces rejected by the faculty?”

  “He’s right,” said Mia.

  “But where would we mount our show?” asked Carly.

  “They won’t let us use the gallery,” said Aleesha.

  “She’s right,” said Marlon. “But we could do it outside the building, set it up on the grass.”

  “It’s November. It could be f
orty degrees out there. It might even snow.”

  “Have it in the hall,” Raúl suggested.

  “I don’t think they’ll let us do that,” said Alfred.

  Marlon said, “We’re students here, right? We pay tuition. We have a right to be in the hall.”

  “But we don’t have the right to put our pots in the display cases.”

  “Just hold them. We’ll line up on both sides of the hall leading to the gallery. We’ll hold our works in our hands for people to look at as they go to the gallery.”

  Bruce smiled and said, “Or we could write ‘Homeless and Hungry—Please Help’ on a piece of cardboard and hold that up.”

  “No,” said Aleesha, “but we could each have a sign on our work saying ‘This was rejected by the gallery.’”

  Their nods told me they were going with Aleesha’s plan. Which sent me to my lawyer’s office.

  48

  Where I actually went was the country club. Layton Kent, my lawyer, maintains an office in the Albuquerque Plaza Office Tower, the tallest building in New Mexico. Although at only twenty-two stories it would be almost a walk-up in New York City.

  Layton conducts most business from his table at the country club, which provides him with both visibility and food. The latter being important for a man who weighs a seventh of a ton.

  Not counting his ego, which would likely kick him up to an even three hundred.

  Most of his clients are also members of the country club, and many of them are also lawyers. They seek his assistance in hiding their wealth from the IRS. In perfectly legal ways, of course.

  I have no wealth to hide. He represents me at the insistence of his wife, the lovely Mariela de Baca Enriquez Kent, who collects ancient pottery. She is my best customer, and I am his worst client.

  Layton nodded his permission to the server, who finally looked at me.

  “Something to drink, sir?”

  “Water, please.”

  “Sparkling or still?”