The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Read online

  Praise for the Pot Thief Mysteries…

  and the latest in the series, The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy

  The Pot Thief …has all the components of a great read – an intricate plot, quirky characters, crackling dialog, and a surprise ending. What’s more, Orenduff successfully captures the essence of New Mexico through humor, romance and even a little philosophical musing. New Mexico’s rich history, people, food, and landscape come alive on its pages. But, while Orenduff’s account is authentic, this book leaves you wanting more of New Mexico and the only way to remedy that is to come see it for yourself. — Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico

  “Orenduff Grabs you by the tortillas, hooks you in early and doesn’t let you go until the last page.” — Marie Romero Cash, author of Tortilla Chronicles

  “The dialogue is fresh and witty, reminiscent of sparkling Thirties screwball comedies with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn bouncing off each other’s energy and zinging home tart observations. The wry Hubert makes the perfect foil for insouciant Susannah.” — Lou Allin, author of Man Corn Murders.

  “Sure to appeal to fans of humorous mysteries.” —Lucinda Surber, Stop You’re Killing Me.

  “Orenduff knows how to spin an intelligent tale and turn a surprising phrase.” — F. M. Meredith

  "Immensely enjoyable. A fabulous read from page one on to the end." —Grace Galloway, owner, Read It Again & Again Bookstore, Houston

  “Everyone loves the Pot Thief. The best-selling book in my shop every month since it hit the shelves.” — John Hoffsis, Owner, Treasure House Books, Albuquerque Old Town.

  The Pot Thief

  Who Studied Ptolemy

  J. Michael Orenduff

  Oak Tree Press

  Taylorville, IL

  THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED PTOLEMY, Copyright 2010, by J. Michael Orenduff, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Oak Tree Press, 140 E. Palmer St., Taylorville, IL 62568.

  Oak Tree Press books may be purchased for educational, business or sales promotional purposes. Contact Publisher for quantity discounts.

  First Edition, January 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover by MickADesign.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-892343-79-6

  LCCN 2009940952

  Dedication

  To a fine colleague and true gentleman, Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997). Your tour of the heavens continues, my friend.

  Acknowledgements

  Contrary to what those of us who write crime fiction would have you believe, murders are seldom solved by one person. Murder mysteries are also a team effort. The team for The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy included Professor Ofelia Nikolova who knocked the rust off the Bulgarian I learned while living in Blagoevgrad and served as a human spell-checker for the Cyrillic portions of the story. Professor of Astronomy Martha Leake bought my first book, The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras, and I rewarded her by making her work on the second. She reviewed my handling of celestial mechanics and telescopes. Carolyn and Lewis ‘Andy’ Anderson – she the local librarian in Questa, New Mexico, he an author and laid-off molybdenum miner – read the manuscript and provided both writing suggestions and proofing. Andy is also my gadfly, keeping my writing honest with all the subtlety of a cattle prod. Roger Paulding, professional editor and author of the excellent and eccentric book, The Pickled Dog Caper, helped me redo the nettlesome first chapter, the editing of which consumed more time and effort that all the other chapters combined. Another gifted writer, Marie Romero Cash of Santa Fe, read the manuscript and gave me ideas and encouragement. Sally Kurrie of Valdosta was a trouper, proofing the manuscript while battling the flu. Finally, I relied as always on my daughter Claire and my life-long gencon partner Lai for their review of the story as it progressed and their proofing when it was finished. With such a great team, I can say – with no false modesty – that any errors that remain are mine alone.

  1

  If you’re looking for a hero, you’ve come to the wrong place. I lack the iron will and steel nerves the job requires.

  I lead a calm contemplative life, pushing pots by day and digging them up by the light of the moon. I excavated in broad daylight back when it was called treasure hunting. Then Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, turning me into a pot thief and my day job into my night job.

  My shop is in Albuquerque’s Old Town where I get about as much human contact as I do out in the dunes. The price tags on my merchandise – four or five digits to the left of the decimal – cause long dry spells between buyers. Few opportunities to chat with customers, even fewer to process their Master Cards.

  Technically, I’m a criminal, but I don’t think what I do is wrong. I have scruples. I never dig on reservations or private land. Let the Indians and the landowners do what they please with their patches of earth. I stick to public land. I figure I’m part of the public, so why shouldn’t I have the right to prospect on our land?

  I love being alone under the bright desert stars with only the spirits of ancient potters for company. I’m a sucker for the lure of buried treasure, the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of the find. It’s hard to describe the pleasure I feel when I find a long-buried pot, overwhelmed by knowing I’m the first person to touch it in a thousand years. Sometimes I think it might be better than sex.

  But how would I know that? I’d been living like a monk. It’s not easy meeting women when you’re on the wrong side of forty-five, only five foot six inches tall, and live in the back of your shop.

  I’m not abstemious in other matters. I enjoy margaritas at Dos Hermanas Tortilleria most every weekday with Susannah Inchaustigui. Don’t worry about pronouncing her family name – it’s Basque. Our watering hole is romantic in a rustic way, but it doesn’t help my chastity thing. She and I are just friends. But it sure puts an end to my silence. Susannah’s quite the talker. Although we discuss anything that comes to mind, the conversation frequently turns to her love life and my illegal adventures, both of which fate seems to delight in contorting.

  On this particular evening, the chartreuse emulsion in our glasses had sunk perilously low as I told Susannah about some pots I wanted. They were not on public land. They were stashed in Rio Grande Lofts. With my constitution, just the thought of skulking around a building full of people sets my stomach churning. Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why I broke in there seven times, got trapped in its basement, and seduced in its elevator.

  I jiggled the ice around in my glass hoping to generate another sip and said, “The longer I looked at the place, the more it resembled Fort Knox.”

  “What’s Fort Knox look like, Hubie?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Then how do you know Rio Grande Lofts looks like it?”

  “It’s just an expression, Suze, like ‘solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’.”

  “I don’t suppose you know what that looks like either, do you?”

  She knew I didn’t because I don’t travel. “I’ve seen pictures of it in insurance ads.”

  “But you’ve never seen a picture of Fort Knox?”

  “They don’t advertise. Can we get back to the point I was trying to make?”

  “You had a point?”<
br />
  I turned up my palms in mock exasperation. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “Maybe a second round would jog your memory.” She waved to the willowy Angie, who brought us fresh margaritas quicker than you can say Quetzalcoatl. We lounged under the west veranda enjoying the last warm rays of a dry October evening. I dipped a chip in the salsa and washed it down with the first swallow of my new drink. Like Albuquerque in autumn, the salsa and drinks at Dos Hermanas are unfailingly refreshing.

  “The point I was trying to make is that getting into Rio Grande Lofts is going to be difficult. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “I have confidence in you,” she said. And then she gave me that enigmatic smile, eyes narrowed, only the left side of her lips bowed. “You’ve broken in to better places than that.”

  “I’ve never broken in to anything,” I protested.

  “You broke in to that apartment in Los Alamos.”

  “I didn’t break in. You kicked in the door.”

  “You tried to get in by stuffing some of your potting clay in the bolthole, remember? But it didn’t work.”

  “That’s because I only put the clay in a little ways.”

  “You know what the Church says about that, Hubert: Penetration, however slight, constitutes the offense.”

  I smirked. “The Church may have lost a bit of its moral authority on sexual matters.”

  “Good point.” She scrolled an imaginary one in the air. “But there was that house in California.”

  “O.K., I committed one break-in. But I didn’t steal anything. I’m not a burglar, Suze.”

  “So you keep saying. But you steal old pots.”

  “They don’t belong to anyone, so it’s not stealing.”

  Here came that smile again. “What is it? Finders, keepers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No offense, Hubie, but if you dug in my grandmother’s grave to get her wedding ring, I’d consider that stealing.”

  “So would I. But I don’t rob graves. And the stuff I dig up is a thousand years old. Surely there should be some statute of limitation.”

  “But that stuff belonged to somebody’s ancestors,” she persisted.

  “We don’t know that. For all we know, the ancient peoples of this area died out and the current tribes moved in from elsewhere.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “True,” I said, warming to my subject, “but here’s what I do know. All of us – black, brown, red, yellow, and white – are descended from a woman we anthropologists call the African Eve who lived in the Rift Valley about two-hundred-thousand years ago.”

  “In the Garden of Eden?”

  “I don’t know if it was Eden, but it was where humans first appeared on the scene, and every human being alive today is descended from that woman.”

  “Come on, that’s just a myth.”

  “Maybe she didn’t chomp on an apple, but she’s no myth. The genetic evidence proves it. There’s a genetic marker in our mitochondria.”

  “I think there’s a vaccine for that now.”

  “Joke if you want to, but genetics proves we’re all one family, so I have as much claim to the loot in the ground as anyone else.”

  “So at the end of the day, Hubie, you and I are both African Americans?”

  “All of us are.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  We clinked our glasses together.

  Susannah left for class. She’s in her late twenties and brings youthful enthusiasm to my occasional illegal capers. When she’s not drinking margaritas or kicking in doors, she waits tables two blocks from my shop at La Placita and attends classes three nights a week. She studies art history but changes majors the way most people change socks. She may be working her way through the University of New Mexico catalog.

  I graduated from UNM with a business degree in the eighties and returned a couple of years later to study anthropology and archaeology. I unearthed some valuable pots during a summer dig. They weren’t from the official excavation site. I figured out a better place to dig and hit pay dirt.

  Literally. I sold the pots to a wealthy collector for more than I earned during my two-year hiatus from school. I viewed the money as a reward for having a better sense of where to dig than the professors who supervised the project. Digging up old pots wasn’t illegal back then, but the university didn’t care about legal quibbles. They expelled me.

  “Can I get you another one, Mr. Schuze?” Angie’s dark eyes peered at me from under those long lashes. How could I say no?

  I sipped a fresh margarita as my mind drifted to those coveted pots. I’ve been hooked on digging up old pots ever since that fateful summer, and it isn’t just the money. I feel a strong connection with the potter who made it. I suspect she might be proud it lasted so long. I even fancy she’s happy I’ve found it.

  I use the pronoun ‘she’ because anthropologists such as Margaret Ehrenberg have argued convincingly that women invented agriculture and created the first pots to carry the seeds and store the grains. My sense of connection is one potter to another, two fellow humans who walked the same earth and put our hands in the same clay.

  Because of the reverence I feel for ancient potters, it pains me somewhat to sell their works. I always make sure the buyer appreciates the piece. The best thing I can do for the ancient potter is find a good home for her work. Of course, if a few thousand dollars find a good home in my pocket, then the pain of parting is sweet sorrow indeed.

  Although passage of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act made it illegal to dig up old pots, doing so still carries little risk. After all, the places one digs for ancient pots are deserted. The same cannot be said of buildings, especially residential ones.

  So I should have been worrying. But the margarita was frosty and the sun warm, and my worries evaporated in the desert air.

  2

  I recalled watching from the windows of my social studies class at Albuquerque High School as the steel framework for Rio Grande Lofts rose towards the sky. Miss Hinkle’s lectures couldn’t compete with cranes and girders.

  The structure started life as an office building with retail space on the street level. It was the third or fourth tall building in town. In my high school naïveté, I assumed we were headed towards a skyline like Manhattan, which – like the Rock of Gibraltar – I’ve seen only in pictures. Opened during a recession, the place never achieved full occupancy. Downtown shopping lost its battle with suburban malls. The property changed hands several times and hosted a variety of ventures whose only common denominator was failure. Eventually, rent from the few occupants failed to cover expenses, and the place was boarded up.

  Albuquerque’s latest revitalization plan encourages people to live downtown, and – surprisingly – it seems to be working. Even my old high school has been converted to lofts. The boarded-up office building also got a facelift. The ground floor was converted to a lobby with an entrance vestibule, mailboxes, lockers for the doormen, and storage space. Floors two through eleven were carved up for residences. I suppose calling them lofts was meant to conjure images of exposed brick, high ceilings, and industrial elevators. I was interested to discover if they really had that look.

  But you already know that curiosity about architecture wasn’t the reason I wanted to break in.

  Apartment – excuse me – Loft 1101 was occupied by Ognan Gerstner, the recently retired chairman of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of New Mexico. He was the person who expelled me from the University. I disliked Gerstner, but that was true before he expelled me. I hold no grudge about it. So revenge was not my motive for wanting inside the building.

  Gerstner forced out Professor Walter Masoir shortly before I returned to school and ended up in Anthropology and Archaeology. Gerstner had convinced the department to divest itself of its Native American artifacts. Masoir was the only holdout to this politically correct plan, arguing quite reasonably that it makes no more sense to operate an anthropol
ogy and archaeology department without artifacts than it would to operate a chemistry department without test tubes.

  The artifacts were eventually returned to the tribes. At least most of them were. It was alleged that one collection of rare and beautiful pots never found its way back to its pueblo. The evidence for this was weak – a statement by a now deceased resident of that pueblo claiming they never received the pots. And the probative value of that statement was devalued further by the fact that the person it was told to, none other than Walter Masoir, was hardly a disinterested party.

  As I mentioned, Masoir was gone before I started my studies, but I read his work, talked to students who knew him, and always admired him. Proving the plan he opposed was at least partially a failure would have been satisfying. But you can probably guess that vindicating an admired professor was also not the reason I wanted to break in to Rio Grand Lofts.

  Neither curiosity, revenge, nor vindication incited my illicit intentions. I wanted those pots.

  3

  After leaving Dos Hermanas, I decided to get the pots off my mind by doing a little amateur astronomy. I often select a planet and chart its location every night for a month or so when I know it’s going to slow down, come to a halt, and head back from whence it came.

  Astronomers call this ‘retrograde motion’. It’s an optical illusion of course. Planets don’t actually turn around. But it sure looks odd. Mars, for example, will stay on the straight and narrow for almost two years. Then – for no apparent reason – appear to go the opposite direction. I don’t know who first observed this strange behavior, but the Greeks knew about it thousands of years ago. That’s why they called them planets, which means ‘wanderers’ in Greek. Most people couldn’t care less, but the planets fascinate me.