The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy (The Pot Thier) Read online

I turned to leave.

  “If it was you,” he said to my back, “you did us a favor.”

  53

  I placed the pots on Martin’s kitchen table, and his uncle’s normally stoic countenance melted to reverence as he stared at them.

  I lifted one of the pots, turning it to the part I wanted Martin to see.

  “I knew there was something strange about these pots when I saw the first one, but it took me a long time to figure out what it is. This line represents the river. Behind that you see the stylized rectangles of a pueblo, and behind that the twin peaks.”

  I stopped talking while he took in what I’d said.

  After twenty seconds, he said, “So?”

  “Look where the peaks are in relation to the pueblo.”

  “To the left. Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “I once sold a pot your uncle made that differed from this one in only three ways. First, it was better crafted, but that’s just a matter of technology. This pot is older and wasn’t made on a modern wheel. Second, your uncle’s pot didn’t have this thick base. But the difference I think is significant is the location of the peaks. Your uncle put them to the right.”

  Martin took the pot from me and rotated it gently in his hand. Then he set it in front of his uncle and began to speak in their language. There was a long silence when he finished. Finally, his uncle spoke a few sentences.

  “You know anything about San Roque?” Martin asked.

  I told him what I had learned during my visit there with Masoir.

  “You know their relationship to us?”

  “I know your languages are both in the Tanoan group.”

  “That puts you ahead of most people,” Martin said. “What else do you know?”

  “I know that pot you brought to me wasn’t purchased at the trading post west of Bernalillo.”

  The old man looked at me and smiled.

  Then Martin and his uncle each told me a story. The uncle’s story was long and lyrical and from the ancient past. Martin’s story was short, sad, and from the recent past.

  After listening to the stories, I understood everything I needed to know about all the pots, even my smashed copies. I figured out most of the details about the murder on the way back to Albuquerque, and those I didn’t figure out, I made guesses about.

  I parked in my usual spot in the alley, but instead of going in, I walked through the alley and circled around Miss Gladys’ Gift Shop to the back of St. Neri and found Father Groaz in his study. After we exchanged greetings, I handed him the paper with the three letters on it. He stared at it for a full minute.

  “The police took this paper from the body of Master Gerstner?”

  I nodded.

  “Do they know what it means?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Horace Arthur thinks it’s the first three letters of my name. I haven’t seen Gerstner in over twenty years, so the only reason for him to have my name on him would be if the person who killed him is trying to frame me, but you can’t do that by typing out three letters, so I never took Arthur’s idea seriously. I thought it was just the word ‘hub’. I didn’t know why he would have that word on him, but I didn’t try to figure it out because it didn’t seem related to the murder. Then I realized something about the letters – they’re Cyrillic.”

  “So you do know what it means.”

  “No, but I think I know the sounds they make. See if I’m right. The Н makes the ‘N’ sound. The Ц makes the ‘TS’ sound, and the ‘B’ makes the ‘V’ sound. So the word must be pronounced something like ‘nootsva’.”

  He roared with laughter and his belly shook like Saint Nick in ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.

  “I guess I didn’t get it right.”

  “Actually, Youbird,” he said while drying his eyes with a handkerchief, “you did vary well. That is the sound such a word would make, but is not a word. These are initials. They stand for Natzionalen Tsenter Vuzrazhdaneto.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.” I was hoping to provoke another belly laugh, but all I got with that line was a chuckle.

  “In English is something like ‘National Center for Rebirth’. He wrote the words for me in the in Cyrillic – национален цeнтъp възражданєто.

  Then he told me more about the Rusyns and the H Ц B.

  54

  At four the next morning, I backed the Bronco onto the apron in front of the exit gate at Rio Grande Lofts, left the engine running and the door open, and lowered the tailgate. The back was loaded with a sturdy steel bar and iron discs weighing fifty pounds each. Each disc had a hole in the middle. The bar was designed to go through the holes in the discs, but I didn’t put it there. I used it to slide the discs under the gate and over next to the column that contained either a low field or a high field magnetic detection device. I didn’t care which one because I was pretty certain I had purchased enough body building equipment to activate either style.

  And sure enough, after I had pushed several hundred pounds of iron under the gate, it opened. I jumped in to the Bronco and backed through past the gate-opening device. The gate closed and I loaded all of the weights save one back in the truck. I pulled forward enough to make the gate re-open then got out and jammed a fifty-pound disk against it. With the gate thusly secured, I drove around the corner and parked two blocks away where I sat for a while recovering from the exertion.

  I walked back to Rio Grande Lofts and removed the iron disc from the gate. As the gate closed, I carried the weight to the glassed in area where I discovered the keypad there had also been replaced by a card reader. It didn’t matter. This was my seventh unauthorized visit to Rio Grande Lofts, and I knew it was my last, so I took a less meticulous approach to getting in. I thumped the weight against the glass panel next to the door and it shattered, making some noise but not enough to be heard outside the basement. The noise I was more concerned about was an alarm. When I didn’t hear one, I set about doing what I had come to do.

  I ducked through the frame where the glass had been and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Why the second floor? Because I didn’t want to risk riding the elevator past the lobby in case some late reveler or early riser would cause the elevator car to open there. And I went only as far as two because I had just unloaded and loaded several hundred pounds of iron in fifty pound increments, and I was too damned tired to climb any higher than I had to.

  I tried the stairway door and it opened. As I suspected, my clay piece was still in place. The police had discovered the clay pieces on ten and eleven because they knew I had left the party on ten, and they suspected I had gone to eleven to kill Gerstner. The crime scene encompassed only those two floors. There was no need for them to check the lower doors, and they hadn’t.

  I took the elevator up, loided a lock and broke in to a loft.

  I made as little noise and spent as little time as I could. Then I left with the door unlocked.

  And rode the elevator to a different loft where I loided another lock, but this time to an apartment I knew was empty, so I was a lot more relaxed.

  Then I rode back to the first loft, went through the door I had left unlocked, spent even less time inside, and this time locked the door on my way out. During this entire adventure, I was wearing thin plastic gloves Sharice had given me from their supply at the dental office.

  The scary part was behind me and there was a spring in my step as I opened the door to the stairwell and started down.

  Then I heard quick noisy footsteps coming up. I leaned over the railing and saw two uniformed policemen several stories below. I started back towards the door then remembered the clay was gone from ten and eleven. My only hope was to get to nine before the cops did and hope that nine, like two, still had its clay plug.

  I did and it did.

  No one was roaming about on nine at that hour of the morning and the police were probably headed to ten and eleven, but when they didn’t
find me there, they would no doubt search the whole building. I assumed I had triggered a silent alarm when I broke the glass. Or maybe an early jogger had seen the broken glass, but it didn’t much matter why the police had arrived. They were here and the odds were I was the reason, so I had to get out.

  But how? I didn’t want to risk the stairway or the elevators because the police would be moving around searching, and that meant they could be using either or both. I could loid my way in to an apartment and hope it was empty, but so what if it was? They’d probably search every apartment. If I could get down to four, maybe Stella would protect me. Or maybe not. What story would I give her to make her say no one was there when the police knocked on her door?

  Then I heard the elevator door opening.

  55

  They had in fact gone to the eleventh floor and searched every apartment, upsetting a few residents in the process.

  They had also posted men in the stairwell and each elevator and then started searching every apartment on each floor, working their way down from eleven. They also searched the first floor and the basement, looking in and under each car, but they didn’t find anyone who wasn’t supposed to be in the building.

  Then they scratched their heads and went home.

  At least that’s what I think happened. I was in the building the entire time, but I wasn’t an eyewitness to any of their searching except on the ninth floor.

  Actually, I wasn’t an eye witness there either, more of an ear witness. I heard them knocking on doors, and I heard one resident say to another that this used to be a good building and now look, first we have a murder then we have cops running everywhere, and the other one said to her there must be drug dealers in here, have you noticed they change the security system every time we turn around.

  I also noticed the cops were surprisingly efficient. They were on the ninth floor less than twenty minutes. It sounded like three of them and there are only eight units per floor, and I knew how long it took to search one of those apartments if all you wanted to look for was something large like a person because I had done it myself. And of course they may have been searching more than one floor at a time. I had no idea how many troops had been dispatched.

  So I waited a very long time, and fortunately no one on the ninth floor chose to throw out any garbage that morning, so eventually I was able to climb out of my hiding place, walk down the stairs to the basement, walk through the glassed-in area, wait until the first person left that morning, and run through the exit gate behind her car. Who cared if she saw me and called the police? I was in the Bronco and on my way in less than a minute.

  I entered Old Town and made a left on the south side of the Plaza. Then I made three right turns around the Plaza, and if you think that put me back where I started, you are good at spatial reasoning.

  From there I drove back to Central, turned left and got to within four blocks of Susannah’s apartment when I spotted a police cruiser just like the one I’d seen in front of my shop. The one near Tristan’s apartment made it a hat trick.

  I figured if they were that intent on finding me, they probably had an APB out, so I took the old bridge over to the west side, avoiding the freeway, and drove north on Corrales Road through Bernalillo and then the nine miles on the state highway to Martin Seepu’s pueblo.

  I parked out of sight and banged on his door.

  “Let me in,” I said when he opened the door.

  “The Indian way,” he said, mocking my voice, “is to greet people with a salutation.”

  “How,” I said.

  “How?”

  He let me in anyway, and I told him the police were after me. He told me he already knew about it from Channel 17’s Roving Reporter.

  “I was at my sister’s house when the news came on. That Roving Reporter is good looking for a white woman. Anyway, she was in front of an apartment with crime scene tape on it, and she said a murder had taken place inside that apartment, and the police had arrested you but then let you go even though dozens of witnesses had placed you at the scene.”

  “Shoot. What else did she say?”

  “Well, it was a longer piece than she usually does. She seemed really fired up about it, too. She said the victim was someone you had a long-standing grudge against and what else… Oh, that you had been at a party in the building, left the party, the partygoers heard a shot, and then you came back covered with blood.”

  “Covered with blood!”

  “That’s what she said.”

  I was pretty certain I was back to doing my own ironing.

  “Then she closed the report by saying it was time for the police to take action, so I guess that’s why they’re after you.”

  “That and the fact I broke in to that apartment again early this morning.”

  He shook his head. “And white people think Indians are dumb.”

  “I need to use your phone.”

  “You know I don’t have a phone. You want me to send up some smoke signals?”

  “Martin, for the first time in my life, I wish I had a cell phone.”

  “My sister has a cell phone. You want me to get it?”

  I used it to call Whit Fletcher. After he tried to talk me in to surrendering and then tried to remind me in oblique language that he and I had never been in Rio Grande Lofts together, I finally got him to listen. Then I explained everything to him, and he agreed to set up a meeting the next night at my shop.

  56

  “I hope you can pull this off, Hubert. My career may be riding on it.”

  “Have I ever let you down?”

  He shrugged and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Thanks for covering for me when we ran in to that reporter.”

  “You knew who she was?”

  “Everybody knows who she is, Hubert. I guess I was sort of surprised the way she looked at you. You two got something going?”

  “You surprised at that, Whit?”

  “Tell the truth, Hubert, I always figured you for a fag, you being so old and never married.”

  “I hope you don’t say things like that around other people.”

  “Don’t worry, Hubert. The detective course had an entire lesson devoted to manners and tact.”

  “Look, Whit, I’m going to the back to gather my thoughts. You let me know when everyone is here.”

  The eventual crowd in my shop that evening comprised Walter Masoir, Martin Seepu, Frederick Blass, Horace Arthur, Bertha Zell, Jack Wiezga, Vlade Glastoc, Whit Fletcher, two uniformed policemen, Susannah, Tristan, Father Groaz, Layton Kent, and one of his paralegals. I own four kitchen chairs, one reading chair, one stool, and two patio chairs, all of which had been pressed in to service in the front of the shop. That left six of us standing – Whit, the two uniforms, Susannah, Tristan, and me.

  “I should start by saying, ‘You’re probably wondering why I called you all together’, but you probably already know why. I need to prove I didn’t murder Ognan Gerstner.” I didn’t add that the only way to do that was to prove who did.

  Then I laid it all out. “A few weeks ago, Professor Walter Masoir told me he believed Ognan Gerstner had stolen a set of pots that belong to the San Roque Pueblo. I decided to try to recover those pots and return them to their rightful owner.”

  Fletcher rolled his eyes and cleared his throat.

  “Professor Masoir is with us tonight. He’s the distinguished looking gentleman to my far left. As you all know if you watch the news, I was at a party the night Gerstner was killed. The party was at the residence of Frederick Blass who resides in the building where Gerstner lived. Mr. Blass is the gentleman in the black windbreaker seated at the back right. I admit I left the party and broke in to Gerstner’s apartment to see if I could find the pots. But I didn’t murder him. I was looking for the pots above the suspended ceiling when I was startled by a loud noise that I now realize was a gunshot. I was so startled, in fact, that I fell and in doing so scratched my arm on one of the wires that hold up the ceiling tiles. Whe
n I returned to the party, Mr. Horace Arthur noticed the blood on my shirt. Mr. Arthur is here seated next to Mr. Blass. Incidentally, Mr. Arthur, the news reported that I was covered in blood. Is that what you told the police?”

  “I told them there were a few drops on your arm. I can’t say what the press reported, but they are lackeys of the police, so nothing would surprise me.”

  Given that Whit and his men were helping me, I didn’t appreciate the political commentary, but I moved on. “Gerstner was later found shot to death in his apartment. Since the shot that killed him seemed to have been fired while I was in that very apartment, the police naturally assumed I had fired it. But I knew I hadn’t fired it, and I knew Gerstner hadn’t been in his apartment when it was fired. So despite the fact the police in this city do a great job, I knew they were wrong in this case.”

  “Cut the crap, Hubert, and get on with it,” said Fletcher.

  “The best explanation I could come up with at first was that Gerstner had been shot in another apartment while I was in his, and then later the murderer had placed Gerstner’s body back in his own apartment. But why would the murderer move the body? I thought it was strangely coincidental that the shot was heard while I was in Gerstner’s apartment. I know there’s such a thing as bad luck, but this was almost too bad to be merely coincidence. So I tried to figure out if another explanation might be possible, and of course it is. There could have been two shots – the one everyone at the party heard and another one that actually killed Gerstner.”