The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein Read online

  Hmm.

  While I was digesting that information, I heard a knock, and looked through the peephole expecting to see Izuanita. She seemed determined to contact me in person rather than by phone. But it was Father Groaz.

  “Hallow, Youbird. I heard yesterday that you had been assaulted. I went to the hospital, but they told me you had been released. You are not seriously injured?”

  After I gave him the details of what happened, he smiled and said, “Too bad wass not a Bible. Would be a better story.”

  I told him about my conversation with Miss Gladys and the fact that she had spurned T. Morgan Fister’s proposal of marriage.

  “Wass probably wisdom for her to do so.”

  I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t, so I told him he had given me sound advice about saying nothing to her. He just nodded.

  Then he came back to my situation. “Being shot is vary serious, Youbird. I know you received only a bruise, but how is your state of mind?”

  “Good, I think. I know I was incredibly lucky, but I try not to read too much into that. Maybe it was the Hand of God, but I’m inclined not to see it that way. If God wanted me to keep on living, he could have done it less dramatically by just not having someone shoot at me in the first place. I don’t think God needs to grandstand.”

  “I don’t know, Youbird. Parting the Red Sea was vary dramatic.”

  He stared at me briefly then let out that loud belly laugh of his. When he stopped laughing, he said, “God hass a plan, but we do not know all the details. Some things happen because God makes them happen. Some things happen because He gave us free will. And some things are just luck.”

  I thought about that after he left. I believed someone had acted freely to shoot me, so there was the free will part. I believed the bullet hitting the book was a happy accident, so there as the luck part. I tended to believe that God had better things to do than have a bullet shot at me and land in a book, but I kept an open mind.

  I called Izuanita and she said she had dropped by several times, and she asked me where I had been. She seemed a little perturbed that I wasn’t at her beck and call. Then she asked how I got her phone number, and I said it showed up on my phone when she called. Then I told her I was sorry to have missed her and that I was glad she had come by, and her tone softened a bit.

  So I asked her for a date. Unlike my invitation to Dolly, I actually used the word ‘date’.

  “Sure,” she said, “I’d like that.”

  But when I said I’d come by for her at seven the next night, she said it would be easier for her if she met me at my place. I had been hoping that Oscar Perez was her father, the two of them sharing a house and a phone number like Dolly and her father, but the fact that she didn’t want me to pick her up supported the other idea I had.

  She was married. No wonder she never told me where she lived. No wonder she just dropped in on me at random times without calling first. I had to hide behind my peephole pretending not to be home and use Tristan’s wizardry just to get her phone number. Of course, in fairness, I’d never asked her for it. Maybe I was afraid it would seem too forward or, worse, that she would refuse to give it to me. Or maybe I had a subconscious suspicion and didn’t want to know.

  I have a Santa Fe phone book, so I decided to look up Oscar and Izuanita and see where they lived. There were about two pages of Perez’s, but no Oscar and no Izuanita. Their phone must have been unlisted.

  I closed the book and thought for a while. Then I opened the Santa Fe phone book again and looked up something else. It was listed.

  42

  Whit Fletcher walked into my shop early Monday morning and said, “You got something against the Cantú family, Hubert?”

  “Well, let’s see. The father stole my appraisal fee, I had to look at his corpse, and then I got falsely arrested for killing him. As far as the son goes, I didn’t much like him the first time I met him, and then he disappeared when I needed some information from him. So I’m not planning to send Segundo Cantú a Christmas card this year.”

  “He wouldn’t get it if you did. He’s dead.”

  “I meant the son.”

  “He’s dead too.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Murder’s never funny, Hubert.”

  “The son was murdered?”

  “You should know,” he said, and then he started reading me my rights. I was sputtering and interrupting him but he just kept on reading.

  “Come on, Whit, you already messed up when you arrested me the first time. Why make the same mistake again?”

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with that first arrest. In fact, I told them I didn’t think you did it, but your fingerprints were on the glass with the poison in it. That’s pretty good evidence. If you didn’t have that slick lawyer, you’d probably be in prison now, and then you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to kill the son.”

  The situation was so bizarre that I half-believed it was a prank. “I didn’t kill the son,” I said in exasperation.

  “He says you did.”

  “How can he say anything if he’s dead?”

  Whit pushed a handful of silver hair off his forehead. “I got to get me a haircut. He didn’t say it. He wrote it. See, after you left, he wrote a note just before he kicked the bucket. This here’s just a copy.”

  I looked at the paper he handed me. It was a photocopy of a book on a floor. The book was open and across the print on the page were written the words, “Schuze did it.”

  “That book was on the floor next to him. He musta’ been reading it when you shot him.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “Not enough anyway. You’re not cut out for this kind of work, Hubert. See, what you should have done is shoot him in the head to make sure he was dead. That first shot severed a major artery, but he probably lived a couple of minutes, just long enough to write in that book.”

  “I don’t own a gun. I wouldn’t even know how to shoot one.”

  “Well, you did miss his heart, but you come pretty close for a beginner.”

  “When was he shot?”

  “Coroner’s best guess is Saturday night.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been me,” I said excitedly. “I was shot Saturday night. You know that because you saw me in the hospital the next morning.”

  “Not this Saturday, Hubert. Last Saturday. And the thing is, not only did Cantú leave that note I just showed you, but one of the neighbors saw you coming out of the house in the middle of the night.”

  Oops. That was the night I had retrieved my three copies. Was Cantú dead on the floor in another room while I was wrapping my copies in bubble wrap?

  “Where did you find him?”

  “In the living room, right in front of those pots, which by the way three of them was missing. But don’t worry. I didn’t say anything about that to anybody.”

  Why do these things happen to me? I could prove Cantú was not dead on the living room floor of his father’s house last Saturday because I was there burgling the place. Although I didn’t see it as burglary because the copies were mine.

  “If he was killed more than a week ago and that note was next to him, how come you’re just now arresting me?”

  “When he was killed is just the coroner’s estimate. We didn’t find the body until yesterday when we got a call from a neighbor complaining about a strange smell coming from the house.”

  My stomach convulsed with nausea. I sat down on the stool and dropped my head into my hands. Whit brought me a glass of water. After I drank the water and my head cleared, I looked up at Whit and told him to get a chair. He sat down next to me, and I told him the whole story, including the parts I had pieced together.

  43

  After Whit left, I packed a picnic basket, put Geronimo in the Bronco, and drove east through Tijeras Canyon. Then I turned north and took the winding road up to the crest of the Sandia Mountains.

  I was about a mile from the top whe
n the Bronco vapor locked. Those of you who began driving after the introduction of fuel injection will not know what a vapor lock is.

  Come to think of it, neither do I. I just know that the carburetor stops sending gasoline to the engine, and the only thing you can do is wait until the temperature and pressure go up or down or stabilize or whatever it is they do. I left the vehicle on the side of the road, donned a jacket and hat, and walked to the summit. I was already on the massif, the steepest part of the road well behind me, but I was winded when I got to the top. It was only a mile, but oxygen is scarce at 10,000 feet.

  I hiked along the rim until I came to an old bristlecone pine I’m fond of. I’m told it was growing in that spot when Caesar was ruling the Roman Empire. The oldest living thing on earth is a bristlecone pine in California dated at about five thousand years old. The one in front of me was just a youngster. Still, I enjoy seeing it, windswept and gnarled, impassively rooted in a harsh environment. It puts things in perspective.

  I don’t get up there much because it’s a long and winding road and too cold and icy in the winter. There’s a tramway to the crest from the west side of the mountains in Albuquerque. In fact, it’s the world’s longest tramway at almost three miles.

  They can take it down so far as I’m concerned. There’s no way I’m getting in a little box suspended hundreds of feet above the ground and held by a skinny cable. Everyone else seems to like it though.

  I stared out over the Rio Grande Valley. A plaque by the tramway claims the view from up there covers eleven thousand square miles. It looks even larger. I turned back to the bristlecone for one last dose of perspective only to see Geronimo lift his leg and pee on it.

  Talk about perspective.

  We walked down to the Bronco to find the vapor had unlocked, and I drove back to Albuquerque and my date with Izuanita.

  44

  “Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took, and loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

  I remembered that phrase skipping across my mind when she’d first walked into my shop. An Aztecan goddess. A half-truth as it turned out.

  She was still tall and thin with skin the color of cinnamon. Her hair was long and straight, her eyes big and dark. Her mouth was wide and her lips candy-apple red. She had long legs and long arms, and she was wearing the same sundress she’d worn that first day, revealing those same lovely long limbs. A large cotton bag was slung over her shoulder. She took her sunglasses off, dropped them into the bag, and smiled at me.

  “I don’t smell anything cooking,” she said teasingly.

  “I was too nervous to cook.”

  “Then we’re going out. Great. Can we take the Cadillac?”

  “I’m curious,” I said. “Did the Cadillac belong to your father or your brother?”

  The smile slid off her face and her big round eyes narrowed.

  “How did you know?”

  “When you put the top down, you reached for the latches without looking for them first. You knew right where the switch was.”

  She smiled again. “Yeah, I had to lean over you to reach it. Did you know I was flirting with you?”

  “A guy has to hope.”

  She laughed. “You’re fun to be with, Hubie.”

  “You didn’t tell me whose car it was.”

  “It was my father’s.” She shuddered.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “He was a bastard. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “Wow,” I said softly.

  She looked down at the floor. “He was a drug dealer in Mexico. A rival gang drove by our house one night and shot out all the windows. My mother and one of my father’s bodyguards were killed. My brother and I weren’t there. We were in boarding school in Santa Fe. The next week my father immigrated to Albuquerque. We’ve never been back to Mexico.”

  Only when she stopped talking did she look up.

  “There was a time when I thought you killed my father.”

  “The police thought so, too.”

  “We were both wrong. I guess I knew that all along. My heart told me you couldn’t do it.”

  “Who did?”

  She looked at the hardwood again. When her face came up, tears were flowing. I handed her my handkerchief. She dabbed her cheeks then took a deep breath.

  “My brother killed him. He was a drug addict. There’s a certain poetic justice in that, don’t you think? A drug dealer’s son ruined by drugs. My father never had time for me, but he worshipped Segundo. When he found out he was taking drugs, he beat him. Segundo was about sixteen then. When the beatings didn’t help, he put him in all sorts of programs. He’d stay clean for a few weeks or a few months, then...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Finally,” she said, “Dad decided to simply write him off. He stopped helping him. He stopped supporting him. Segundo came to me frantic, wanted me to talk dad into giving him more money for a cure, but I knew what he wanted the money for. You could see it in those jittery eyes. Dad spent a fortune on treatments. He even bought Segundo a house in the neighborhood so he could keep an eye on him. Let him drive his precious Cadillac.”

  “Was it late last fall when your father cut off Segundo?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because Segundo came to my shop in December with one of your dad’s pots. He paid me five thousand dollars to copy it.”

  “Where would he get five thousand dollars?”

  “The pot he brought was worth fifty thousand. He probably agreed to sell the pot to a collector who gave him the five thousand as an advance.”

  I could almost see the wheels turning. “He needed the copy to put on the shelf so Dad wouldn’t realize the original was missing.”

  “I wouldn’t have copied it if I knew that was the plan. I thought the pot was his.”

  She was shaking her head as I spoke. “I had it all wrong; I thought you and Segundo were working together. He would steal the pots and you’d sell them.”

  “So you decided to spy on me and see what you could find out. Your husband is a plumber, right?”

  She stared at me.

  “It was you in that van watching me. But why? So what if your brother was ripping off your father. You said you hated him.”

  Her face darkened. “Those pots are mine, Hubert. He spent a fortune on my brother while I had to pinch pennies. Those pots were my share of the inheritance. Segundo had already gotten his half – more than his half. When he started in on the pots, I knew I had to stop him. I confronted him and told him I was going to tell Dad about him stealing the pots.” She spoke in a low but forceful voice, the rage contained just below the surface.

  “And that’s when he killed your father?”

  “Yes. And ran away like the coward he’s always been. He told me the whole story last Saturday. He had gone to Dad and told him you had stolen the pots and replaced them with copies. Dad bought it because apparently you have a reputation as a pot thief. He said he had a plan to trap you. He would lure you there under the guise of wanting an appraisal and they’d get your fingerprints on a glass. So when they called the police to charge you with stealing the pots, they could prove you’d been there because your prints would be on one of Dad’s glasses.”

  “But the real plan was to frame me for your father’s murder.”

  She nodded.

  “But after he killed your father, why didn’t he take the pots?”

  She gave me a cynical smile I’d not seen on her before. “I’m surprised you couldn’t figure that out. You seem to know everything else.”

  “Maybe I did figure it out. He wanted me to take the rap. If the pots are gone, they’ll search my place after I’m arrested and find out I don’t have them, and that will weaken their case. But if the pots are still there, their theory would be that I was going to go back later and get them. After all, it takes a lot of time to properly wrap and box twenty-five valuable pots.”

  I was thinki
ng I’d propounded a theory along those lines to Susannah after I found the pots weren’t in the first house even though Whit had seen them after I was there, but my recollection was muddled by the margaritas I’d been knocking back that night.

  “So your brother finally came back to get the pots, you confronted him, and he told you the whole story, even admitting he’d killed your father.”

  She reached into her bag.

  “Why would he do that,” I asked.

  “Because I had a gun on him,” she answered in a flat voice.

  I believed her. She had one on me. I don’t know anything about guns, but I was pretty certain the gun she pulled out of her bag was a .38 caliber.

  And I didn’t have any books in my pockets this time to stop a bullet.

  “I had to kill him, Hubie. He would have taken every penny of my inheritance. Can you imagine what it’s like growing up knowing your father is a drug dealer? Knowing he was responsible for your mother’s death? The only think I clung to over the years was the fact that at least I’d get something out of him when he died. And then Segundo started draining him dry. I had to kill him. I had to.”

  “Just like you have to kill me?”

  Shoot, I thought to myself. I didn’t mean it as a directive to her. I said it to myself because I was upset that when I said that dramatic line – “Just like you have to kill me” – my voice cracked. I had hoped to be calm like Bogart.

  “I’m sorry, Hubie. I really do like you. But I was afraid you’d figure it out. All those years I’ve waited, all that deprivation I’ve suffered can’t be for nothing.”

  What’s he waiting for? I thought to myself. Sure, I’m wearing a Kevlar vest, but I knew from recent experience that being shot is no fun even if the bullet doesn’t penetrate. I was just glad that she was aiming at my body.

  Then the door to the workshop swung open, and Whit Fletcher was aiming at Izuanita’s body.