Page 23 of Close To You
“I need to talk to the dealers who sold to him directly.Soto’s pulling transaction records from the auction houses—Sotheby’s, Bonhams, the Scottsdale auctions.If Ashford bought in person, someone interacted with him.Someone saw his behavior up close.”
“Do it.Take Attcity.I’ll start the paperwork for a search warrant, but I’ll need more than a collector profile to get a federal judge to sign off.Get me something that ties him to the victims, not just their art.”
Kari and Attcity spent the next two days working the phone and driving.The auction houses were cooperative once Marshall’s name was attached to the requests—the Art Crime Team had a long relationship with the major houses, built on years of recovering stolen works and pursuing forgery cases.Records arrived by encrypted email, purchase histories going back three years, buyer information for every lot Ashford had won.
The numbers were staggering.In twenty-two months, Ashford had spent over two million dollars on Indigenous art.Paintings, sculpture, jewelry, textiles—he was buying across every medium, every nation, every price point.But within that broad pattern, the purchases of work by Redhouse, Tafoya, and Honanie formed a tighter cluster: higher prices, more aggressive bidding, and a frequency that accelerated over time.He’d bought three Redhouse paintings, two Tafoya sculptures, and four Honanie necklaces.The total for those nine pieces alone exceeded seven hundred thousand dollars.
“He’s got the money,” Attcity said, scrolling through the spreadsheet Soto had assembled.“Four hundred million from the pharma sale.Even with the estate, the ex-wives, taxes—he could buy art at this rate for decades.”
“He doesn’t have decades.That’s the point.”
They tracked down the auction house specialist who’d handled Ashford’s bids at Sotheby’s—a woman named Carolyn Bechtel who worked out of the company’s Los Angeles office.Kari called her from the field office workroom with Attcity listening on speaker.
Bechtel remembered Ashford vividly.“He came to the pre-sale viewing for our American Art auction last March.Spent three hours in the gallery—longer than any other buyer.Most collectors walk through, flag the lots they’re interested in, and leave.Mr.Ashford stood in front of each piece for ten or fifteen minutes.Not examining condition or provenance, which is what serious buyers do.Just looking.”
“Did you interact with him directly?”
“Extensively.He asked me to arrange a private viewing of the Redhouse painting—Lot 47, a large oil on canvas from 2005, estimated at seventy-five to ninety thousand.During the private viewing, he asked questions I’d never gotten from a buyer before.Not about the painting’s investment potential or exhibition history.He wanted to know what Redhouse was thinking when he painted it.What the brushstrokes revealed about the artist’s state of mind.Whether the colors had emotional significance in Navajo tradition.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What I could.I have a background in art history, and I’d read the catalog essay, so I gave him context.But it wasn’t enough for him.He said—and I remember this clearly because it struck me as unusual—he said he wanted to ‘feel what the painter felt.’Those were his exact words.He wanted to understand the experience of creating the painting, not the experience of looking at it.”
“How did he behave during the auction itself?”
Bechtel paused."He was the winning bidder on the Redhouse at a hundred and ten thousand to twenty thousand over the high estimate.When the hammer came down, he didn't react the way most winners do.No smile, no nod.He closed his eyes.For a long time.The woman beside him—an assistant, I think—had to touch his arm to bring him back."
“Did you notice anything about his physical condition?”
“He moved carefully.Slowly.And yes, his hands trembled.I assumed it was age or medication.He also repeated himself twice during our conversation—asked the same question about the painting’s colors that he’d asked five minutes earlier.I didn’t think much of it at the time.Collectors are often distracted.”
"The assistant," Kari said."The woman who was with him at the auction.Do you have a name?"
"I don't, I'm sorry.She was younger, dark hair, well-dressed.She didn't bid or speak, just stayed close to him.You might check with the registration desk.Sotheby's requires identification from anyone who registers for paddle access."
After the call, Kari sat with what Bechtel had described.Closed his eyes when he won the bid.Wanted to feel what the painter felt.Repeated questions within minutes.The Alzheimer’s wasn’t just a diagnosis in a medical record.It was present in every interaction, visible to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
They reached a second dealer that afternoon—a woman named Irene Duran who ran a small gallery in Albuquerque’s Old Town that specialized in Pueblo pottery and sculpture.Duran had consigned two Tafoya pieces for a group show the previous spring, and Ashford had attended the opening.
“He stood in front of Linda’s transformation figures for forty-five minutes,” Duran said.She was in her seventies, heavyset, with reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.“People were moving around him, eating cheese and crackers, talking about prices.He didn’t notice any of them.He was locked in.When I finally approached him to ask if he was interested in purchasing, he turned to me and said, ‘She puts her breath into the clay.Can you feel it?’”
“What did you say?”
“I said something polite about Linda’s technique.But that wasn’t what he meant.He wasn’t talking about craftsmanship.He was talking about—I don’t know how to describe it.Transfer.As if Linda had literally exhaled her life into the sculpture and it was still there, still breathing, and he could feel it if he stood close enough.”Duran shook her head.“I’ve been in this business for thirty years.I’ve seen collectors become obsessed.This was different.This was need.”
“Was Linda at the opening?”
“She was.She’d come down from San Ildefonso for the event.Ashford approached her near the end of the evening.I didn’t hear the conversation, but I saw Linda’s face afterward.She looked shaken.She came to me and said she was leaving early, and she asked me not to give anyone her personal contact information.She didn’t say who she meant by ‘anyone.’She didn’t have to.”
“Did she describe what he said to her?”
“Not specifically.She said he wanted things from her that weren’t for sale, and that he’d asked in a way that frightened her.Linda wasn’t someone who frightened easily.She’d grown up in a traditional household, she’d navigated the commercial art world on her own terms for twenty years, she’d dealt with aggressive collectors before.This was different enough that she asked me to watch for him at future events.”
“Did he come back?”
“Not to my gallery.But I heard from other dealers that he’d been showing up at openings and previews all over Santa Fe and Albuquerque.Always the same behavior—standing in front of specific pieces for long periods, asking unusual questions, becoming agitated when he couldn't buy what he wanted."Duran paused."I should have reported it.I didn't know to whom, or what I'd say—' there's a rich man who looks at art too intensely'?That's half my clientele."
The third dealer they reached was a private broker in Scottsdale named Gil Torrance, who handled high-end Indigenous art sales outside the major auction houses.Torrance was less polished than Bechtel and more direct.
