The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (11 page)

I knew better than to comment on that, so I told her about my money woes.

“You could go back to that cliff dwelling above the Rio Doloros
o
. All it would take
is
one good pot to balance your budget.”

“I’m not a grave robber.”

“You wouldn’t be robbing a grave. You
marked the grave with that stone
, so just dig somewhere else.
Surely there’s not another body at that site.
”

“Hmm. You don’t think it would be wrong to dig close to a grave?”

“You told me it wasn’t a grave. And it makes sense that they wouldn’t b
ury their dead where they lived
.”

“Okay, it’s not a formal grave. But his body is there, and it seems… maybe not ghoulish, because I wouldn’t be digging him up, but maybe… I don’t know, disrespectful?”

We sat in silence while we
thought about it.

“
Maybe you should move him,
”
she
finally
said.

“
No way. It was bad enough to find him in the first place. And to actually touch
his hand with the hole in it.”

I shuddered at the memory.

“M
aybe
digging there is not disrespectful,
” she said. “But
leaving him there
might be
.
Maybe he should have a proper burial.”

I shook my
head. The whole idea was crazy.

“I already thou
ght of that when I
pushed the dirt back and placed the
rock
over him. I was going to make a cross from two sticks and
jam
it into the soil behind the rock
.
Then
it dawned on me that he was obviously not a Christian.”

“Why not?” she joked, “
you just told me he had a hole
in
his hand like Jesus.”
She started to laugh at her little joke then bolted upright. “
What do you mean he had a hole in his hand?”

“I told you about that. I was probing with my rebar and—”

“But I
assumed it
just touched his hand. I didn’t think it made a hole.”

I remembered I hadn’t told her that part in detail because it was
s
o disagreeable
, and I was ashamed of it
to boot
.

“I didn’t cI0" face=think I had pushed hard en
ough to penetrate a hand
. You know h
o
w careful I am. I
’d
feel awful if I broke a piece of ancient pottery. So I was shocked when I grasped the hand and felt a hole.”

“Where was the hole?”

You’ve probably already figured out where this is headed, but I was still in a fog.

Her question seemed odd. “Like I said, it was in his hand.”

“But
where
in his hand?”

“
I didn’t look
. As
soon as I realized it was a hand, I dropped it like a
burning coal.”

The look in her eyes was beginning to worry me. Her stare made me feel like there was something spooky about me.

She spoke slowly. “A thousand-year-old corpse can’
t have a hole in its hand. It’
s nothing but a skeleton.”

My
own hand
went to my mouth. The dolmades casserole was threatening to make an unscheduled and highly unpleasant public appearance. I swallowed hard.

After the grape leaf concoction settled down, I drank some
of my
margarita.

“I need one with more tequila in it,
”
I said
and
signaled
for a
refill.

11

“I can’t believe you didn’t realize the hand had flesh on it.”

“I told you I dropped it like a hot coal. It
was a dark night, and the hand
had cold hard fingers. I didn’t stop to ask myself whether the
y were plain bone or bone with
dried
flesh on them.”

“But what about the hole?”

“It was in the
ground,” I said, hoping to lighten the conversation.

She rolled her eyes. “The hole in the hand.”

“It
must have been
in the
palm.”

“Jeez, Hubert. How can you drop a hand like a hot coal and still have felt both the fingers and the palm?”

“It was like an accidental handshake. When I reached into the excavation, his fingers slid
along mine and mine along his
. Except for my middle finger that caught
i
n the hole.”

“I guess I can see why you didn’t know if the fingers were just bone, but didn’t it dawn on you that the pal
m
didn’t feel like a skeleton?”

“How would I know what a skeleton palm feels like?”

“Well,
I’m pretty
sure
it wouldn’t feel like a normal
one
.”

I had to admit she
might be
right. If so, that meant I
might
not have violated the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. If the body was not k bo" face="Pa ancient, it may not have been a Native American.
The guy I thought had eaten coyotes and gophers may have had a burger and fries for his last meal.

But w
ho was it?
And
what era did he come from
?

The same questions were occurring to Susannah. “How long does it take the
flesh to rot off a buried body?
”
she asked.

“Can we change the subject, please? I want to forget the dead body, not analyze its decomposition.”

The forced remembrance of
unearthing a corpse
had my stomach churning, but the fresh margarita was moderati
ng
my anxiety.

“You can’t forget it, Hubert. It may be a murder victim. You have to report it to the police.”

Here we go again, I thought to myself. She wants to turn this into a murder mystery.

“The guy I found was not murdered, Susannah. A murderer would have to be crazy to drag a dead body down those steep switchbacks and along the narrow ledge
to bury it in a ruin. It would be easier and safer just to throw the body into the gorge.”

“Someone might find it in the gorge.”

“So what? The corpse isn’t going to sit up and announce who killed it.”

Her big brown eyes lit up. “A bullet hole! That’s what the hole was – a bullet hole.”

“A bullet through the hand isn’t fatal.”

“That’s just the first bullet, Hubie. If you read more murder mysteries, you’d know that. When the murderer aims his gun, the victim’s
natural
response is to stick up his hand in self defense.”

She illustrated by extended her arm out in front of her, palm forward. I
suppose
the feig
ned fright on her face was
to add a dash of
drama
.

“It’s the second bullet that kills. If you
r digging had been a foot or two in a different direction, you might have felt a hole in his chest instead of his hand.”

“Gee, I guess I should feel lucky I only poked a hole in his hand instead of driving the rebar through his heart like I was trying to kill a vampire.”

“Sarcasm won’t help, Hubert.”

I sighed. “I wish it w
ere
a bullet hole. Then I would
n’t
feel so bad about what happened. But it wasn’t a bullet hole. It was the same diameter as my rebar.
Face it
–
I poked a hole in a dead body.”

“You must have dropped
that hand
like a luke-warm coal instead of a hot one
, Hubert
. You not only felt the fingers and the palm, you also measured the diameter of the hole.”

“I didn’t measure it. My middle finger fit in it, and my middle finger is about the diameter of the rebar.”

“But you
were pushing the rebar gently.”

“Like I always do.”

“So how could it poke a hole?”

I took another sip of my drink. I didn’t want this one to get watered down like the first one.

“Okay,” I relented. “Maybe the rebar didn’t make the hole. But I don’t think a bullet made it either.”

“What, it was a birth defect?”

“
Maybe it was one of those piercings young people seem so fond of these days. Maybe there was a tattoo around the edge of it. Who knows?
”

“I do. It was a bullet hole because your rebar couldn’t punch a hole in a skeleton.”

“
Maybe it could. I remember seeing a mummy in the
Maxwell Museum
of
Anthropology
at the University
. It still had skin on it, and it looked paper thin and brittle.”

“Did the palm you touched feel brittle?”

“
It didn’t occur to me to check whether he needed some Jergens. And
i
t’s not my problem.”

“Sorry, Hubie, but it is your problem. You found a modern dead person, not an ancient mummy. You have to report it to the police.”

Congress may have labeled me a pot thief, but I always try to do the right thing.
If it was a modern person – murdered or not – I had a duty to tell someone. But I still thought it was one of the ancient ones. It just didn’t make sense that a modern person would be buried that deep in that location. Unless…

“Maybe he was officially buried there,” I blurted out.