The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (19 page)

But you already know my thinking was wrong, don’t you? Rational all right, but wrong. You’ve figured out what came next, right? Sure you have. If Fletcher had accepted my explanation, I wouldn’t be relating the rest of this conversation, would I?

“I think you knew a fella name of Gerstner, didn’t you, Hubert? Seems to me he was the one kicked you out of the University. I guess some people might call that motive.”

I didn’t tell him I had looked it up after Susannah asked about it. I already knew it was Slavic, but I wondered if it meant anything. Just the sort of thing Susannah would say illustrates my desire to accumulate useless knowledge. So I looked up Ognan and found out it means ‘fire’.

“I thought so. I can prove I wasn’t there because I heard the shot. I didn’t know it was a shot at the time, but it must have been. And when I heard the shot, I was not with Gerstner.”

“I know, but I think I might be able to do it.” I was thinking I might have to admit to the breaking and entering in order to escape a murder charge. I hadn’t stolen anything, and I have no criminal record, so maybe I could get off with no jail time. Hey, I was breaking in for a good cause. I wanted to return the pots to the Ma. My lawyer could play up that angle. I might even come out of it looking good, and who knows what it could do for sales. I was beginning to think I was home free.

37

I refused to be questioned until my lawyer arrived, so I spent the time thinking about my plight.

I kept telling myself I had nothing to worry about. I hadn’t killed Gerstner. If he had been killed in his apartment, it must have been after I left. The noise I heard wasn’t a gunshot after all. He had come home after I left, and someone else had come to his apartment and killed him. After they got the time sequence all straightened out, the police would realize I hadn’t done it, and that would be the end of the matter.

Then I realized there was another explanation. Gerstner had
two
apartments. That’s why 1101 seemed so empty. He was in the process of moving as I had surmised. When Fletcher said Gerstner was killed in his apartment, he meant the
other
apartment. But Fletcher also said Rio Grande Lofts was the murder scene. O.K., no problem. Gerstner was moving to a different unit in the same building. All of a sudden I felt great. It was either a confusion about time or a confusion about place, and when the confusion was cleared up, the whole mess would be over.

Layton Kent, Esquire, finally showed up, and when I complained about how long I’d been in custody, he said only an hour had passed since my call, and I couldn’t dispute him since I wasn’t wearing a watch.

“I already have. I swung by Judge Aragon’s house to have him sign a little writ one of my paralegals drew up. We’ll stop by your place for a coat and tie – you do own a coat and tie, do you not? – and then to the club for lunch.”

“I don’t want lunch. I want to go home.”

“Nonsense. I need to ask a few questions in order to defend you properly should the
gendarmes
be so foolish as to retain you as a suspect, and being away from my table at the lunch hour is inconsistent with my reputation.”

I was getting a headache. I don’t know why they call them ‘splitting’. Mine felt like my head was being crushed together, not split apart. I followed Layton out to the curb where one of his paralegals was waiting in Layton’s Rolls. The Rolls is one of his many ostentations, but I must admit it felt good to slide onto the supple leather of the back seat.

Layton is probably right about reputation, but his reputation as a great lawyer is not what commands his princely fee. He is widely considered to be the most influential man in Albuquerque. He knows everyone who is anyone, and quite a few people like me who are no one. They all owe him favors.

Mariella Kent is the Grande Dame of Albuquerque society. She sits on every board of any significance, and no fundraiser of any size is attempted without her appointment to the steering committee. She is reputed to be a descendant of the Duke who gave our fair city its unusual name. This seems unlikely since the Duke never set foot in the New World, but I suppose it is possible a member of his family may have done so.

Mariella’s old money gave Layton’s career a rocket boost when they married, but he has added to the pile considerably with his legal practice. He serves the legal needs of most wealthy Albuquerqueans, including many other prominent lawyers. This he is able to do because he belongs to no firm and thus is not seen as a competitor. He runs his practice with a bevy of paralegals and secretaries but no other attorneys. And he doesn’t practice corporate law and only rarely stoops to criminal law when a current client requires it.

In light of all this, you might wonder why Layton Kent would have me as a client. The answer is that the charming Mariella is a collector of the rarest and most expensive Indian pottery, and I am her personal dealer. I don’t know if Layton knows the background of some of the beautiful works in his sprawling
pueblo moderne
, but if he does, he has no doubt arranged for both himself and his wife to have what lawyers call plausible deniability.

Layton’s table overlooks the 18
^th
green at his club. He wouldn’t know an eagle from a roadrunner, but he does know the players, and as they finish their rounds, they come by his table to pay obeisance. He pointed me to my chair and took his own. A covey of staff appeared, picking up glasses and putting others down, placing napkins across our laps, and uncorking Dom Perignon.

The waiter stood like a sentinel while Layton sipped the famous bubbly and signaled it fit to drink with a nod of his head. My glass was filled, and I took a sip. Dom Perignon is marginally better than New Mexico’s own Gruet, but it costs ten times as much. Though I indulge my own pleasures to the extent my purse allows, I can’t justify the extra cost of the fabled champagne. On Layton’s nickel, however, I was more than happy to sniff the yeasty nose and taste the dry effervescence of the most famous of all bubblies.

Layton was wearing a gray wool suit with an almost invisible nutmeg pinstripe. His shirt was zucchini green and he wore a knit tie the color of wet sand. There were stays in his collar and a diamond in his tie the size of a martini olive.

“We’ll both have the
truchas en terracotta
,” he announced to the room at large. He took a small sip of champagne and leaned towards me.

“Now tell me how you ended up in this enchilada.”

I told him the whole story while he waved to golfers, diners, and staff and an assortment of people visited the table to squeeze his hand. No one kissed his ring.

Our fish arrived, the clay was cracked and then peeled off tableside, and the succulent trout was de-boned and placed on our plates. One bite of the perfectly cooked fish with its piñon pesto stuffing and for a brief moment I forgot about my legal troubles.

I feared Layton hadn’t heard a word of my story, but he surprised me when it was over by summarizing the entire thing and asking a few pertinent questions. Then he dismissed me.

38

I went straight to my hammock and fell asleep.

When I awoke, it wasn’t yet five o’clock and I didn’t feel like opening the shop, so I walked over to the church and sat on the
banco
like a zombie until I heard footsteps approach from behind.

The light went out of his eyes and he sat down next to me and crossed himself. “Yas, I knew him. I had bad thoughts about him. May Got bless his soul.”

The good Father then launched into a dissertation on the sad history of a group of people who have many names and are unknown by all of them. During his
recitative
– Wagnerian in its length – I remained confident that if I continued to pay attention, the point of the narrative would eventually emerge.

I was mistaken.

The Rusyns consider themselves to be the indigenous inhabitants of Carpathia. Some of Carpathia is in Ukraine, which claims the Rusyns are Ukrainians and the Rusyn language is a backward dialect of Ukrainian. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was a movement among the Rusyns to have their own country but the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia somehow undermined that pipe dream. I didn’t see what that had to do with Ukraine, but at least the breakup of Czechoslovakia was something I had heard of, which is more than I can say for the rest of the story.

Evidently, the majority of the Rusyns have now turned their attention to achieving recognition and some degree of autonomy within Ukraine. To undermine that effort, the Ukrainian government has begun a “Rusyns are Ukrainians” propaganda campaign. This plays in to the hands of a hard-line splinter group who insist on a Rusyn state and are alleged to be willing to achieve their goal by any means necessary.

After he had told me all that (you should be grateful I condensed it), he said, “Zo, Youbird, to make a long story short—”

“Too late for that,” I interjected.

But he pressed forward. “There are Rusyn cabals around the world seeking to support minority rights for my people. There iz a cell even here, and Gerstner joined our little group of peaceful dreamers.”