"And who is that?"
"Cobb, Owens, and Mackintosh."
"Is there anyone else besides your lawyers who might be able to help me?"
"The staff at the Museum of New Mexico Foundation co-sponsored the event and sent out invitations to their members. You might want to talk to them."
"Would they have a complete list of all the guests?"
"Only the museum foundation members, I would imagine," the woman said.
"A blanket invitation went out to all Rancho Caballo residents through our monthly newsletter."
"I'm particularly interested in talking to a gentleman with a Hispanic surname. Supposedly, he owns a home here. He may be Spanish or Mexican." Gilbert consulted his notebook and read off the description Prank Bailey had provided him.
"Do you know anyone like that?"
"As I said before, I'm afraid I can't help you."
Gilbert got the concierge's name, thanked her, and walked back to his car. Nothing about this case seemed to come easy. He checked the time. First, he would try the two women Roger Springer had admitted taking on late-night tours of the Roundhouse. He had been unable to reach either of them yesterday. After that, he would stop at the county assessor's office and get a listing of who owned lots and homes in Rancho Caballo.
He doubted that too many Hispanic surnames would pop up on the tax records for the subdivision. gilbert's interviews with the women confirmed Roger Springer's account of impromptu, innocent after hours tours of the governor's suite. But Gilbert came away with the sense that he'd heard a canned, rehearsed story from each woman. Neither had struck him as the type who would be thrilled by the opportunity to have just a private tour of the Roundhouse. He couldn't help but harbor the suspicion that Springer and the women might have had a completely different agenda for the late-night visits-like having sex on the floor in the governor's private office.
It wasn't all that kinky. Once, when investigating a report of fraud at a state agency, Gilbert had walked in on a manager who had forgotten to lock his office door while he was performing oral sex on his girlfriend.
He walked down the long wide hallway of the old county courthouse, a lovely WPA building two blocks from the plaza. The hand-carved beams, finely crafted corbels, delicate tin light fixtures, and the sweeping staircases had been retained, but the guts of the building had been ripped out and modernized after the district court and sheriff's department had moved to other locations.
As a child, Gilbert had occasionally accompanied his father to the courthouse when it still housed all the county services. Back then, his father knew most of the people who worked there on a first-name basis. Gilbert knew none of the workers he passed in the hallway, and it only deepened his feeling that he was a stranger in his hometown.
Maybe it had been a mistake to take the promotion to sergeant and move back to Santa Pc. So far, it had 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."