The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Page 8
I parked the Bronco on the corner of 4th and Silver, climbed between the captain’s chairs, over the folded-down back seat, and into the back. I shortened the adjustable legs on the tripod, attached my refractor scope, and poked the front end between two panels of the curtains. To prevent passers-by from seeing inside, I safety-pinned the panels above and below where the scope protruded. Then I aimed the scope and adjusted the eyepiece until the image of the keypad filled the entire field on the glass.
After twenty minutes, a car pulled up to the entrance of the parking garage of Rio Grande Lofts, and I watched through the scope as the driver keyed in #2330. The gate slid open, the driver drove through, and the gate closed. A second driver arrived not too long after the first. She was driving a large white SUV. The window rolled down and a red-nailed finger keyed in #9999. Once again, the gate opened, she passed through, and the gate closed.
I removed the scope from the tripod, placed it in its case, and drove home.
The scope and tripod went inside with me. Breaking in to my house would be difficult, but breaking in to the Bronco would be easy even for someone like me who isn’t a burglar, so I never leave anything valuable in it.
I opened the package of maple nuts and a very cold bottle of New Mexico champagne. Yes, there is a New Mexico champagne, although it is made by a French family called Gruet. Their Blanc de Noir is astonishingly good. I often enjoy a few small flutes in the evening and almost as often with breakfast.
The maple nuts and champagne made a delicious if somewhat unorthodox midnight snack, and I enjoyed it as I reflected on what I thought I had learned.
First, although I had seen only two examples, I thought it a plausible assumption that all the codes to open the entrance gate at Rio Grande Lofts were four numbers preceded by a pound sign. Second, people are not very careful when selecting codes. 9999 is easy to remember, but someone trying to gain unauthorized access would probably try all the easy codes first – 1234, 1111, 9999, etc. I might be able to get in just by punching in easy-to-remember number combinations, but since I already had two codes I knew would work, I didn’t plan to stand at the keypad punching and hoping.
I wanted in fast, I wanted in covertly, and I wanted out safely.
19
My first foray was for reconnaissance.
I read until one-thirty in the morning. Then I put a light windbreaker over my shirt and walked downtown. Being the only person afoot at that hour was a little scary. But there was still a trickle of traffic on Central, so I figured I could run onto the street and stop a passing car if a mugger approached.
I reached the garage entrance shortly after two a.m., stepped up to the keypad, and punched in #2330. The gate slid open and I walked down to the parking garage of Rio Grande Lofts. It seemed almost too simple.
I ambled around the garage for a few minutes to get the lay of the concrete. There was a lot of it. Floors, pillars, walls, even the ceiling was concrete. I thought it would look better with a coat of plaster, but I guess aesthetics is not a major consideration in parking garages.
A well-lit glassed-in area illuminated the otherwise dark garage. Two elevators and a door were visible through the glass. The door to the area was locked, and another keypad was next to the knob. I stared at it for a moment and asked myself the obvious question: Why was there another keypad? Surely the same code that opened the gate wouldn’t open the door. What would be the point?
But I tried it anyway. Sure enough, #2330 didn’t open the door. Maybe an apartment number would do it. I tried the only apartment number I knew, 1101. Nothing happened. I tried #1101. Nothing happened.
Then I walked around the garage some more. I’m in the building, I told myself, so surely I can get past the garage. I thought back to the night I watched the keypad through my telescope, and I remembered the second entrance code I’d seen was #9999. I also remembered how people pick easy numbers. So I revisited the keypad by the door to the glassed-in area and punched in 9999. Nothing. Then I punched in #9999 and 9999#. Same result. Then I tried 1234, #1234, 1111, #1111, 2468, #2468, and 6666 just for the devil of it. Then I gave up.
You’re probably smarter than I am, so you may have already realized I was going to have a problem leaving the building. If so, I can only ask where you were when I needed you?
I walked to the exit of the garage and waited for the gate to open. But of course it didn’t. I tried to slide it open. I might as well have tried to slide one of the concrete columns to a different location. The sensing device was a squat pedestal covered with sheet metal, and I could see no way of removing the cover. And what would I have done had I been able to get the cover off? Cross the wires in a clever way to make the gate open? Remember this is Hubert Schuze, technophobe extraordinaire.
So I did nothing. Nothing to get out, that is. Instead, I tried the doors to all the cars. Several of them were unlocked. I guess if you park in a secure garage, you may not bother locking your car. I selected an old Mercury Grand Marquis, climbed in to the back seat, and eventually fell asleep.
The sound of a car starting woke me up at 6:40. I was cold, unshaven, hungry, and needed to pee. The latter was the only one I could deal with. I drenched the right front tire of a Mercedes 700. Maybe the owner would think a dog did it.
I paced around the garage trying to warm up, running my hands through my hair, trying to stroke the creases out of my clothes, and waiting for the right moment. The third person out of the elevator and through the glass door was a woman in her twenties looking poorly made up and well hung over. I patted my pockets as if I had forgotten my keys. When she pushed the door open, I grabbed it and walked in. She never looked back.
Elevator or stairs? I had the notion the elevators might stop automatically on the first floor. If the doorman saw me when the elevator opened, I’d be sunk. So I took the stairs all the way to the eleventh floor, my stomach churning from hunger and fear. My footfalls on the concrete steps sounded like gunshots and reverberated through the hard-surfaced stairwell. I expected someone to burst through a door at any moment and demand to know who I was and what I was doing in the building. The combination of anxiety and climbing eleven stories had me panting like a dog by the time I reached the door to the eleventh floor, but at least I made it.
For all the good it did me. The door was locked. I may have uttered a profane epithet. Then I stood there trying to figure out why the door was locked. I guessed the door could be opened only from the hallway. That way, no one fleeing the building during a fire could accidentally enter back in if she had started out on the seventh floor, for example, miscounted in her panic, and tried to exit at the second floor thinking she had reached the safety of the ground floor.
I descended the stairs trying each doorknob in turn. They resisted my twist until I reached the first floor. I eased the door open and peered in to the lobby. A doorman was holding the front door for someone leaving the building. When he turned around, his field of vision would include the door I was holding open, so I closed it and waited.
I opened the door a few seconds later and saw the doorman’s back. He was sitting on a stool staring outside. The elevator opened, and the doorman responded by turning around. I closed the door before he could see me. Then I asked myself what the devil I was doing. I answered that I had no idea.
I was cold and hungry. I wanted to go home. I suppose I could have simply walked out. The doorman might have been surprised to see a stranger depart the building, but that had to happen from time to time, didn’t it? A resident could drive in to the garage with a visitor from out of town and take that person up to his apartment for the night. The next morning, the resident might go off to work and his visitor might decide to go down the block to buy a magazine. He would need to take along at least $2.95 plus sales tax.
I could walk out the front door. It might be standard procedure for the doormen to ask all visitors whose guest they were, especially if the guests expected to regain entrance after buying their magazines. What if I
were asked? I could say I had enjoyed a night of unbridled passion with one of the residents who preferred to remain anonymous.
I heard footsteps in the stairway above me. One of the residents was skipping the elevator in order to get some exercise. Or maybe the elevator was too slow during the morning rush and the person was in a hurry. Of course it didn’t really matter why the person was coming down the stairs. What mattered was that in a few seconds, I would be spotted.
So I descended to the basement. And of course the footsteps followed. I wasn’t thinking fast enough. Americans don’t walk to work anymore. The person coming down the stairs would be headed for his car. So when I got to the basement, I left the glassed-in area and walked between a row of parked cars. Then I bent down to tie a shoe that was not untied and saw a man come out of the stairs and walk down a different row of cars. A few moments later, I heard a car start.
Then another person emerged from the glassed-in area. I was caught in the morning rush in the basement of Rio Grande Lofts. I decided to put aside temporarily the problem of how to exit the building. I had come to reconnoiter, and I felt duty-bound to do it. So I walked back to the glassed-in area, waited for the next resident to open the door, did my patting-my- pockets-for-my-keys routine, and walked in the door before it closed. The man who had passed through the door turned to give me a suspicious look, but then decided to let it go. Maybe he was running late for work.
I strode boldly to the elevator and punched the up button, but my resolve wavered as I recalled a camera in the Albuquerque Hyatt that had made me a murder suspect by placing me on a floor I had no reason to visit. A ding sounded. The little up arrow illuminated. The elevator door slid open. I craned my neck to see if I could spot a camera without it spotting me, realized that was stupid, and sidled in just as the door slid shut.
No camera. I suppose they were so confident in their perimeter security, they didn’t worry about an intruder getting as far as the elevator. I exhaled, expecting a smooth ascent to eleven. The ride was quicker than I anticipated.
That was because it stopped at four. The doors opened to reveal a woman with impressively quaffed blond hair. She wore tan slacks, a white blouse, and high heels she didn’t need. She was taller than me in her bare feet.
“Going down?”
“Up,” I replied and reached for the ‘close door’ button.
“I’ll ride along,” she said and stepped in before I could get the door closed. “Better to grab the elevator while you can this time of morning,” she added cheerily by way of explanation.
Once she got a better look at me, she traded in cheery for wary. “Why are you going up at this time of morning?”
I gave her a wan smile and patted my pockets. “Forgot my keys.”
“Looks like you forgot your iron, too,” she said flatly.
She struck me as a take-charge person who would not hesitate to call security if she spotted someone suspicious in the building, and I figured I fell in that category. “Sorry,” I said, “ever since my wife left me, I’ve been sort of disheveled. I have no idea how to iron. In fact, I think she took the iron.” I’m not good at improv.
“Why did she leave you?” she asked, unabashed.
“She met a younger man.”
She seemed to relax slightly.
The elevator reached the eleventh floor and I stepped out. She stuck her foot against the door.
“Did she take your razor, too?”
The woman had no shame. Then she smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Hubert.”
She laughed. “I’m Stella, but of course you already know that, don’t you? If you need to borrow an iron, just ask. I might even show you how to use it.”
Then she let the door slide shut.
As the door closed, I gave her a little wave like an idiot.
Why she thought I knew her name I couldn’t say. At least our last exchange convinced me she wasn’t going to alert the authorities to my presence in the building, so I went about doing what I had come there to do.
I walked up to the door of Loft 1101 and grasped the knob. I pushed it and pulled it. Then I tried to turn it. It was locked, but of course I wouldn’t have opened it even had it not been. I studied the door and lock and saw everything I needed to see.
I walked the length of a hall carpeted with a low industrial loop in inoffensive beige with random squiggles of blue and green. Acoustical tiles formed the grid of the ceiling. Beige walls and light green wall sconces in the shape of seashells completed the decor. If the aim was a loft look, the target had been missed.
There were eight doors with numbers on them (1101 to 1108), two elevators, and the door to the stairs. A stainless steel door eighteen inches wide and thirty inches tall was at eye level and hinged at the top. Pushing it inward revealed a shaft. I stuck my head in the shaft and saw it extended back two feet from the wall. I looked down and saw a slanted ledge three or four feet below the door. The ledge was a foot deep and covered the half of the shaft nearest the wall. Behind the ledge, the shaft continued down. I leaned in further and could see another ledge about ten feet further down.
A trash chute. I conjectured the office workers who once toiled in the building dumped their paper waste in to the chute. It would fall to the basement where a custodian would shred it, burn it, bale it, or whatever they did with waste paper in those days. The slanted ledges at each floor forced the dropped paper to the back of the chute so people reaching in from the floors below wouldn’t be hit by the paper falling from the floors above. From the aroma, I could tell the wastepaper chute was now a garbage chute.
I pulled my head out and took a breath of fresh air. Then I stuck it back in and looked up, thinking maybe Gerstner had cleverly lodged the pots at the top of the chute. All I saw was the top of the chute.
I walked to the stairwell door and studied the lock. Then I stepped out to the stairwell, gave my Achilles tendons a workout on the stairs, went through the glassed-in area, and approached the exit.
A car edged up to the exit and the gate slid open. Just after the car cleared the gate, I sprinted through. The exit ramp has a restricted view of the street, so drivers have to ease out slowly once they get past the gate. As I suspected, the driver saw me run through the gate behind her. I could have kept going. She wasn’t going to apprehend me. But she might report the incident to the building’s staff, and I didn’t need them on high alert when I returned.
So I ran up to the driver’s window and tapped on it. A pair of eyes with bright purple shadow gave me a suspicious look, which came as no surprise considering I looked like a street person. But when I made a cranking motion with my hand, she rolled down her window an inch or so.
I had my wallet in my hand. “I saw this on the ground near your car. Is it yours?”
She shook her head.
“O.K., I didn’t want you to drive off without it if it was yours.”
“Thank you,” she said and rolled up the window.
The sun was up, the sky was clear, and the air was calm, so it was a pleasant walk home. I went straight to my hammock and slept until the middle of the afternoon. When I awoke, I started to prepare a very late breakfast.
20
Which I never ate. In fact, I never even cooked it because before I could get started, I heard a persistent knocking at the door to the shop and went forward to find Miss Gladys Claiborne with her dreaded chafing dish.
Sausage, onion rings, canned soup, cereal, and crackers are things most of us eat. They are ready to go and require minimum preparation. Brown the sausage, fry the onion rings, heat the soup, spread something on the cracker, pour milk over the cereal. But for the Casserole Queen, these are not foods. They are ingredients. The dish she brought contained them all. Crumbled cooked sausage was combined with corn flakes, crushed Ritz crackers, cream of corn soup, and of course the ubiquitous shredded cheddar. The onion rings were spread on the top to form a crust and the entire thing baked to submission.
The
strangest thing about these concoctions is they actually taste good. Of course sausage would probably make boiled barley taste great. I found myself asking for seconds and wondering if the same dish would be even better with chorizo substituted for the regular sausage. That’s when I knew I was losing my grip. Sleeping in a parking garage will do that.
Miss G reminded me that the second Thursday of the month was coming up, and I would be welcome at the covered dish night at St. Alban’s. I had gone with her once just to be nice, and now I felt bad every time I turned down chances to go again, but most of the ladies who attend are either widowed or divorced, and I felt like the prize at a raffle.
My Aunt Beatrice once dragged me to a covered dish fund-raiser at the Methodist church she attended. I believe they must have used the same recipes. Maybe they’re the staples of cuisine américaine, and I’m ignorant because I grew up eating Consuela’s Mexican cooking. I did notice at St. Alban’s that Episcopalians have fancier chafing dishes and eschew the use of paper plates and plastic forks altogether.
I also remembered that St. Alban is the patron saint of sufferers. I don’t know if indigestion is a serious enough malady to rank as a suffering, but I said a small prayer to him anyway after Miss G departed. Then I took another nap to let the food settle in preparation for the cocktail hour.
21
“‘A night of unbridled passion?’ You were actually going to say that to the doorman?”
“It was just a phrase that came to mind, Suze. I probably would’ve told him it was none of his business.”
“So why didn’t you just walk out? Or, better still, why didn’t you drive there? Then you could have driven out. And if you’d found the pots, you could have put them in the back of the Bronco. How were you going to carry them on foot anyway? Steal a pillowcase from Gerstner and sling it over your shoulder with the swagger inside?”