The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier by J. Michael Orenduff Page A

invites ambush. There being no place to hide seems to apply only to the victim.
    The early morning sun shown between the ramps, casting long shadows of the pillars and creating regions of pitch dark.
    I approached the Bronco warily. The back window was down as I had left it, and I was happy to see Jürgen’s motionless form between the tailgate and the back seat. I reached in to poke him awake, then hesitated.
    During the night, he had lost about eighty pounds, and his hair had turned from black to brown.
    When reason took over, I realized the body in the Bronco was not Jürgen.
    Then I realized it was indeed a body.
    I don’t know how I knew that, but I couldn’t have been more certain of it had he sported a toe tag and been under a white sheet in the morgue. It wasn’t the bump on his head – it didn’t look bad enough to be fatal.
    Maybe I sensed there was no rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Maybe it was his unnaturally awkward position. Maybe it was his pallor. The skin on the back of his neck had a bluish grey tinge. In the cold night air of Santa Fe’s 7200 feet, he had dropped considerably below 98.6 degrees. He was not so cold that you could use him to ice down a bottle of Gruet, but neither was he room temperature.
    I stood there debating whether to touch him. If by some miracle he were alive, I didn’t want him to die because I failed to seek help. So despite the fact that I was positive he was dead, and despite the fact that I hated the idea of touching a dead person, I placed my hand on his shoulder and shoved him.
    “Barry?” I said.
    He didn’t answer. I touched his neck. It was even colder than it looked. I went back to my room and called 911. Then I sat there wondering how a live Jürgen Dorfmeister had become a dead Barry Stiles in the back of my Bronco in the parking garage of the La Fonda.
    I figured there were three possible explanations for Stiles’ death.
    The least likely scenario was natural causes. He was walking through the parking garage, had a heart attack and climbed into my Bronco before he died? Someone found him dead and put him in the vehicle because he didn’t want to leave the poor unlucky deceased on the floor?
    The second possibility was that Barry was murdered, and someone wanted to frame me by leaving the body in my truck. Weird things like that have happened to me in the past, but I couldn’t think of anyone with a motive to harm me.
    The most likely explanation, I decided, was that Barry was killed for some reason having nothing to do with me. The murder took place in or near the parking garage, and the murderer selected my vehicle as a good place to dump the body because the back window was open. Even that explanation had too many coincidences. I knew the victim. He was in the parking garage of my hotel. He ended up in my Bronco.
    I decided to say as little as possible to the Police.
    The detective from the Santa Fe Police Department was named Danny Duran. He had a chiseled face and a bodybuilder’s physique. He was about my height. His dark suit looked like it would fit me perfectly. It fit him like a wetsuit. Maybe he’d bought it before he started lifting weights. He told me the body was being taken to the morgue and my Bronco was being impounded as evidence. He was chewing gum.
    “I’ll need the key to your vehicle.”
    I had a moment of panic because I remembered Jürgen asking for my keys. Then I remembered I didn’t give them to him. I found them in my jacket pocket, took the Ford key off the ring and gave it to him.
    “Tell me about the body in your vehicle.”
    “I went to the parking garage about eight thirty. I saw the body in the back. I touched him and realized he was dead. Then I came up here and dialed 911.”
    He made notes as I spoke. “Where did you touch him?”
    “In the parking garage.” I thought that was obvious, but didn’t say so.
    He looked up from his note book. “Where on his body did you touch him?”
    “Oh. On his