been nothing but a painful, disconnected experience.
He found the assessor's office and asked for the Rancho Caballo subdivision property tax records. The printout he got wasn't helpful at all. No Hispanicsurnamed owners were listed, but a sizable number of the houses were owned by out-of-state corporations and foreign companies.
He compared the records with the names Fletcher Hartley and Frank Bailey had given him. None were listed as Rancho Caballo owners. But one local business, Kokopelli Design Studio, was carried on the books as a corporate owner of two homes.
Gilbert noted the address for the studio. It was one block off the plaza.
On his way out of the building, he stopped at the land-use planning office and asked to speak to the director.
Gilbert had one question to ask, of purely personal interest.
'How much water does the Rancho Caballo golf course use?' Gilbert asked, after introducing himself to the head of the planning office.
The director, a nearly bald, gray-faced older man, scowled at the question.
'On the average, between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand gallons a day.'
'How did that kind of consumption get approved?'
'Rancho Caballo was initially approved to use only recycled gray water for the golf course,' the man answered.
'That was part of the original subdivision master plan.'
'That's impossible,' Gilbert said.
'There isn't enough development in the area to supply that volume of gray water.'
'Rancho Caballo bought additional water rights from an adjoining landowner last year. They can legally pump hundreds of acre-feet of groundwater from now until the wells run dry.'
'Who sold the rights?'
The man chuckled sourly.
'You don't follow local politics much, I take it. Sherman Cobb sold the water rights to the corporation. He owns a couple of sections of land that butt up against the subdivision. It caused quite a stink in the press, and the environmentalists raised hell about the depletion of the underground aquifer. But it got approved anyway.'
'I see,' Gilbert replied, thinking maybe not much had changed in the 150 years since the end of the Mexican- American War, when the Stars and Stripes were first raised over Santa Fe. at the museum foundation offices, just behind the fine arts museum, Gilbert was directed by a receptionist to the publicist's office on the second floor. He climbed the stairs and found Fletcher Hartley sitting at a cluttered table in a small staff lounge near the stairwell, poring over photographs.
'What are you doing here?' Gilbert asked.
Fletcher waved off the implied censure.
'I'm doing research. The publicity director is an old friend. She was more than willing to share the guest list for the O'Keeffe benefit, as well as photographs she took at the gala.'
'Aren't you supposed to be calling art dealers?'
'I've done that, to no avail. Now I'm gazing at candid snapshots of smug art patrons. Care to join me? From the look of it, there are untold numbers of potential suspects. So far, I have ten shots taken of Amanda Talley with distinctly different groups of people. She appears to be quite the social butterfly.'
'Hand me a stack,' Gilbert said as he sat down at the table.
They sorted through the pictures and assembled two piles of photos. One accumulation featured Amanda Talley in every shot, while a larger stack included everyone else who had been photographed at the gathering.
With the help of the publicist, they whittled down the number of unidentified people in the photographs to slightly under twenty.
'What's next?' Fletcher asked.
'Do you know who owns a company called Kokopelli Design Studio?'
Gilbert asked. He stretched to ease the stiffness in his shoulders, and started stuffing the two sets of pictures into envelopes.
'Bucky Watson owns it. Buckley is his given name.
He's unscrupulous. Once he made me an absurd offer to buy my inventory of completed works. I threw him out of my studio.'
Gilbert picked through the Amanda Talley photographs until he found one with Watson, Roger Springer, and Frank Bailey standing in front of the dub- house bar with two unidentified men. He studied the picture.
'Watson's design studio owns two houses in Rancho Caballo,' Gilbert said.
'Both in the million-dollar range.'
'My, my, Bucky's doing quite well for himself.'
'Can a design studio generate that kind of cash flow?'
'Bucky is really a small conglomerate. He owns the design studio, a gallery on Canyon Road, and an art crating company. And he also dabbles quite a bit in commercial real estate.'
'So, he's got big bucks. I get the feeling you don't like him,'
Gilbert said.
'I do not,' Hetcher replied, as he reached for his topcoat.
'Besides being greedy, he has no aesthetic sense and a shallow charm that wears thin.'
'Why do people like Watson come here?' Gilbert asked.
'I see we share the same resentments about the new pioneers,' Hetcher noted.
'While Santa Pc still has appeal, it is not the place we once loved.'
Outside, in the lateness of the day, Gilbert said goodbye to Hetcher, who waved his umbrella in response, and jaywalked to the plaza.
Gilbert smiled as he watched. He remembered the image of Hetcher sitting in the deep shade under the portal of his house on summer evenings, sipping his single malt scotch, and entertaining the endless stream of friends who dropped by.
Gilbert's family had a standing invitation to Fletcher's informal soirees, and the gatherings sparkled with eccentrics, bohemians, artists, writers, and the intelligentsia. Fletcher's friends were men and women of every imaginable persuasion and inclination who loved the city with a passion that made them a vital part of the community.
For Gilbert, going to Fletcher's house had been like opening a window on the world. He smiled at the memory of Pletcher and his pals leading everybody off on a walk to the plaza for band concerts and other festivities.
Those were magical evenings when Gilbert was young.
What did Fletcher call the people who had recently migrated to Santa Fe? New pioneers-that was it. The dry was glutted with affluent colonists busy discarding identities, leaving relationships, abandoning careers, forging new lifestyles, pursuing New Age aspirations, and picking through the Santa Fe scene like shoppers at an outlet mall.
There were probably more psychic healers, spirit guides, psychotherapists, and self-help gurus per square foot in Santa Pc than anywhere else in the country.
Stolen art and stolen culture, Gilbert thought. He pushed back the sour feeling. It was close to the end of the business day. Maybe Bucky Watson would still be at his design studio on Water Street.
'I felt like I was the target of an investigation,' Bucky Watson said.
He'd been bitching from the minute he'd arrived in Roger Springer's office to discuss his meeting with Sergeant Marrinez.
'Stop worrying,' Springer said. He sat across from Bucky, who drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair and shifted nervously.
'I told you on the telephone the state police would be asking questions,' he added.
'About the O'Keefle fund-raiser,' Bucky shot back.
'Not my property holdings.'
'It's no big deal. I talked to Vance Howell at the governor's office.
They've got no leads, so the cops are taking a scattergun approach to the case, hoping something will turn up.'
