The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (12 page)

“I told you that wasn’t the house.”

“You never said that,” I countered.

“Well,” she admitted, “maybe not in so many words, but I always thought you were too confident.”

“I’m still confident. That was the house.”

“Then how come the pots were gone on Thursday and back on Sunday when Whit got there?”

I was ready for that one. “Because they took the pots before Thursday. Then, when the guy died, they figured they better put them back. After the heat’s off, they’ll take them again.”

She gave me a look of total incredulity. “You have got to be kidding me. Why would they put the pots back after they killed the guy?”

It was time to explain my brilliant theory. “They didn’t kill him. They took the pots sometime after my appraisal and before I went back in on Thursday. They were home free. Then somebody murdered the guy on Saturday night or Sunday morning, so they brought the pots back because if they got caught with the pots, the police might also tag them with the murder, thinking they had killed him to get the pots.”

Susannah rolled her eyes skyward then took a drink from her margarita. Then she took a long slow deep breath. “Hubert,” she said, “this is bizarre even by your standards. First, who are the ‘they’ who took the pots? Second, who are the ‘they’ that killed the guy? And third, why would the first ‘theys’ – the ones who took the pots – feel like they had to put them back after the second ‘theys’ killed the guy?”

Somehow it sounded less convincing the way she said it. But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. I may be only 5’ 6” and 160 pounds, but I’m still a man, and we don’t easily admit to being mistaken.

“I don’t know who the ‘they’ were who took the pots,” I said confidently, “but I know for certain the pots were gone, so there has to be a ‘they’ who took them. Or maybe a him or a her. Someone took them, that’s for sure. Then a second ‘they’ – or a him or a her – killed the guy. It can’t be the first ‘they’ or him or her, because if you already have the pots, why go back and kill the guy?”

She stared at me for a while. Finally she said, “Here’s a better theory. The pots didn’t belong to Cantú. They never did. They were never in that house you broke in to. They were in another house and they’re still there.”

“But the house I broke in to,” I protested, “was the house where I did the appraisal.” Except I think I may have pronounced it ‘appwaisal’.” I was on my fourth margarita, still trying to deal with the shock of what Whit had told me.

“Face it, Hubert,” she demanded. “It was not the house.”

“But it was exactly like it.”

“All the houses in
Casitas del Bosque
are exactly like it. They’re cookie-cutter houses. That’s why they all have the back window in the same place.”

“And the same cream-colored shade?”

“Yep.”

“And the same fireplace?”

She nodded. “The same fireplace.”

“And the same beige carpet?”

“The developer probably got a great deal on a bulk purchase.”

“Even the shelves?”

“What else would you put on the sides of a fireplace?”

I took another drink from my margarita. Probably a mistake. I was already feeling queasy. “So,” I said, “the pots are in another house in
Casitas del Bosque
?”

She leaned back in her chair and gave a slight nod. The nod may have been slight, but the triumph behind it was palpable.

“That seems way too coincidental,” I protested. “I mean, what are the odds that Cantú, who asked me to copy three of the pots, lived in the same condominimum edition as the guy who actually owned them and got killed?”

“I think you mean ‘condominium addition’.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you said ‘condominimum edition’, like it was an issue of a magazine dealing with very small condoms.”

I was totally confused.

“Actually,” she continued, “it’s not coincidental at all. If the collector was a recluse and wanted someone to take the pots to be copied, he would probably choose a neighbor. What would be surprising would be if Cantú
didn’t
live near the collector. It’s just like I said from the beginning, Hubie. Cantú was just the errand boy, and you wasted all that time watching his house, and you even stole his car.”

“But it still seems suspiciously coincidental that Cantú picks this time to move,” I contended. “How do you explain that?”

“Maybe the collector gave Cantú some money for helping with the sale of the pots and Cantú decided to move to a better neighborhood.”

“And leave his car?”

“That part is odd. Wait a minute! Maybe Cantú is the murderer!”

Here we go again, I thought to myself.

“It makes sense,” she said. “He kills the collector for the pots and then leaves town. He can’t make his getaway in his own car, so he buys a new one, or borrows one, or rents one, or steals one…no, he wouldn’t steal one …but he gets another car and leaves.”

“So,” I said, “he doesn’t want to take his car because he’s on the lam and he wants to get out of town fast.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“But he takes the time to pack up all his belongings?”

“Maybe he was really attached to them.”

“Face it,” I said. “Neither one of us has a clue what’s going on. “

“I guess you’re right.”

“The one thing I do know is that I’m not taking the car back.”

“So cars are joining pots on the list of things you steal?”

I ignored that jibe. “If Cantú was the errand boy, then he must know the collector pretty well. So I’m going to hold the car until Cantú places an ad in the paper like you said in your note. I’ll give him his car back when he tells me where the collector went. Then I can collect my twenty-five hundred dollars and be done with the whole mess.”

Susannah walked me home. Out the front door of
Dos Hermanas
. Across the street and up a block to the Plaza. Diagonally across the Plaza to my street then a block down on the left to the entrance to my shop. Just past the United Plumbing van on the right.

When I got inside, I brushed my teeth and splashed some cold water on my face. Or maybe I brushed my face and splashed some cold water on my teeth. I’m not certain. Whichever one it was, it sobered me up enough to tell Susannah about the United Plumbing van.

Being a Woman of Action, she handed me the phone book I had used to look up the address of Segundo Cantú and ordered me to look up United Plumbing.

I actually found it interesting. Turns out there are about two hundred plumbing firms in Albuquerque. There are small one-person operations, franchises like Roto-Rooter, big mechanical contractors, air-conditioning experts, and firms that specialize in one thing like backyard spas.

The variety amazed me. You can get a plumber in this town to do just about anything. Some are even available twenty-four hours a day. Some are radio-dispatched. All of them are licensed and most are bonded.

Well, you wouldn’t put ‘not bonded’ in a yellow page ad, would you?

The names of the companies include standard ones like A-1 Plumbing and companies named after their owners like Pacheco’s Plumbing. Then there were some with cutesy names like All Knight Plumbing, Drain Busters, Flo Right, H2O Services, Pipes R Us (they didn’t have the ‘R’ turned backwards), and my personal favorite, Plumbology. I am not making this up.

Finally, there were a lot of names you would find only in New Mexico, like Zia, Coyote, Desert Sky, Cactus, and my favorite as an anthropologist – Petroglyph Plumbing. There’s only one kind of plumber that Albuquerque didn’t have – one with the name of United Plumbing.

When I woke up on Thursday morning, a family of desert badgers were having a burrowing contest in my cranium.

Susannah must have readied my coffee – I’m pretty certain I didn’t – so I hit the brew button, took off my undies and turned the shower on full blast. After the hot water had warmed the tile floor in the shower, I sat down and let the water cascade over me for maybe twenty minutes.

I didn’t even bother to towel off. I just wrapped myself in my robe, filled a mug with hot black coffee, and staggered out to my patio. My fuzzy-brained plan had been to sit in the warm morning sun and sip coffee until the headache went away.

What I had forgotten was that there was another headache in the patio by the name of Geronimo. It was bad enough that he tried to lick me to death, but did you ever hear of a dog who drank hot coffee?

I had to get a fresh cup – who wants to drink after a dog? – and then I had to stand up to keep it out of his reach. I was in the midst of cursing him for interfering with my hangover recovery when I realized it had gone away.

The hangover, not the dog.

So I stood there feeling the warm morning sun as it peeked over the east side of my patio wall.

And realized Susannah was right. Cantú’s house was not where I had appraised the pots. When she and I had gone there, me blindfolded in her Crown Vic, I had been convinced it was the right house. It was Cantú’s address as listed in the phone book. The location seemed right, about the same amount of time and number of turns as my first blindfolded ride. The size of the house seemed right. The back window was in the right place. The door was the right distance from the curb. I was positive it was the place. But you may remember me mentioning a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that some small detail was wrong. Now I knew what that detail was.

I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner, but I felt great that I knew it now because for the first time since my twenty-five hundred dollars disappeared, I could see how I might be able to get it back. And maybe a lot more.

I shaved, brushed, flossed, and gave myself a few spritzes of piñon cologne. The shop that sells it also offers desert jasmine, cactus flower, desert mistletoe, yucca, and midnight cereus.

Ah yes, midnight cereus. A flower of legend. It’s a cactus, and for 364 days a year (365 in leap years) it does its imitation of a dead stick. But on one night each year, it blooms. And what a bloom it is – full, white and spiky. Resembling a water lily, it releases its intoxicating scent then closes forever with the rising sun.

Because I often dig for pots at night, I’ve seen the bloom on several occasions. It is spectacular. But like other plants, it also has a root, not nearly as interesting to look at but much tastier than the flower. Some Native Americans eat the root, and some wacko ecologists want to make eating it illegal because they claim the plant is endangered. I don’t know if the plant is endangered or not, but if it is, it’s because it’s difficult for a plant to propagate when its flower has only a few hours a year to be pollinated and this occurs when most insects are asleep.

My hunch is that the cologne called midnight cereus is not made from the actual flower. But piñon is common enough and smells clean and sweet, so I adopted it many years ago as my signature scent.

I looked good, smelled good, and felt good.

I went outside to take in the morning desert air and leaned against my new Cadillac convertible. Well, not mine exactly. But Susannah had rigged up a switch so that I could start it and drive it whenever I wanted to.

I was feeling great.

Fate must have directed me to groom myself so meticulously that morning because as I stood on the sidewalk in front of my shop taking in the clear crisp air and the clean scent of piñon, I got just the faintest whiff of another scent, a tropical citrusy scent, a scent that set my heart to pounding.

I turned to face upwind and she was there, striding towards me with that easy, self-assured gait, like a fashion model on a runway except without that look of insouciance. Instead of the aloof expression of models, a laughing smile playing across her sensual lips, and her long hair frolicked in the morning breeze.

Her stride was confident and natural. A song played in my head.

Tall and tan and young and lovely

The girl from Ipanema goes walking

And when she passes

Each one she passes goes aaah

When she walks it’s like a samba

That sways so sweet and swings so gently

That when she passes

Each one she passes goes aaah

Except she wasn’t from Ipanema. She was from the city of Tenochtitlan on the island in Lake Texcoco. Long limbed and lean. Sinewy and sexy. Also known as Izuanita.

“Hi, Hubert.”

Be calm, I told myself. Be cool.

“Hi,” I answered.

So far, so good.

“That car is so cool. Don’t tell me it’s yours.”

“I won’t tell you that because it isn’t. I’m just keeping it for somebody.”

She put one of those long lean hands lightly on my forearm, a casual unthinking gesture to her, but it set my pulse racing. “Can we go for a ride in it?”

“Just what I was thinking,” I said. At least I didn’t offer to give her the car. But I did remember what Susannah had told me about girls and dogs, so I said, “Would you mind if my dog came along? He loves to go for rides.”

“I love dogs.”

I went inside and out to the patio where I put Geronimo’s new lead on his new collar. On the way back to the front, I said to him, “Don’t blow this if you know what’s good for you.”

He stood up when he saw her, placing his front paws on her chest – sly dog – and she hugged him and then started rubbing his ears. When she stopped and he calmed down a little, I pulled him back.

When all four paws were back on the ground, she said, “Maybe you should take that bandana off. It makes his neck seem sort of long.”

After I had removed the bandana, she stared at Geronimo for a moment.

“Now it seems even longer.” She looked at me and smiled. “Maybe you should put it back.”

I did and then opened the door for Izuanita. Geronimo weaseled in before she did – no manners at all – and went straight to the driver’s seat. I held the door for Izuanita and then went around to the driver’s side. I pushed Geronimo into the back seat and slid behind the wheel, wondering how I would explain the jerry-rigged switch. But she didn’t ask about the switch.

Instead she asked, “Can we put the top down?”

Sure, I thought to myself. If I can figure out how to do it.

“Like I said,” I explained, “I’m just keeping it for someone else. I not sure I know how to— ”

Whereupon she reached up to the top of the windshield, threw back a couple of lever-looking devices and then leaned across me and threw a switch that was on the left side of the dashboard next to the light switch.

I briefly reflected on the fact that both Susannah and Izuanita knew more about cars than I did, but my primary thought arose from the “leaning across me” part of what happened. She was so natural, so comfortable, so at ease in herself that I thought she truly did not recognize how sexy she was.

The good news was that the effort to reach a knob on the far left of the dashboard resulted in her being very close to me, and she stayed there even though her assistance in lowering the top was no longer needed.

Geronimo took advantage of the situation to jump into the front seat and ride shotgun. I didn’t care. As long as he didn’t try to take the middle between Izuanita and me, he could sit wherever he pleased.

“How about some music?” she asked as we turned onto Central.

“I don’t even know if the radio works,” I admitted.

“Let’s play a tape,” she said. Then she opened the glove compartment and rummaged through some old cassettes until she found one she liked. It must have been one of those collections they sell on television because it had a bit of everything on it.

The ones I recognized were
You’ve Made Me So Very Happy
by Blood Sweat & Tears,
Down On The Corner
by
Credence Clearwater Revival,
Put A Little Love In Your Heart
by Jackie DeShannon,
Sweet Caroline
by Neil Diamond,
Lay Lady Lay
by Bob Dylan,
Aquarius
by The Fifth Dimension, and
Someday We’ll Be Together
by The Supremes. None of them my kind of music – I’m more into Ella Fitzgerald than Diana Ross – but all of them tunes I’d heard because they’re still on the play lists of some radio stations in Albuquerque.

The only radio I listen to these days comes to me from a satellite, but you can’t escape other people’s radios when you walk or ride anywhere these days, so you hear them whether you like it or not. It’s usually not, but I have to admit it was fun listening to these goldie oldies. Of course doing so while driving in a 1969 Cadillac convertible with a beautiful woman by my side probably added to the festive youthful feeling that washed over me.

If you’re paying attention, you noticed that I remembered seven of the songs on the tape Izuanita popped into the cassette slot of the radio. There were a lot more I didn’t recognize, so if you do the math, you might think we went a long ways. In fact, we took a short drive over to the Hurricane Drive-In on Lomas, but we let the music play while we ate.

The Hurricane was Izuanita’s suggestion. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch the previous day (not counting chips and salsa) so The Hurricane sounded just right. The place has a red and white metal sign with incandescent light bulbs so you know it must have been erected in the fifties, and I don’t think anyone has touched it since. If you looked only at the sign, you’d assume the place was out of business, but if you look at the drive-in spaces next to the menus and the speakers, there are always cars.

Albuquerqueans ignore the beat up sign and crowded conditions because sometimes we hanker for a simpler time when cholesterol and carbohydrates were words know only to chemists. The most popular dish is called the Disaster Burrito, a god-awful concoction. It begins as a flour tortilla rolled up and stuffed with beef and beans. Then it’s covered with curly French fries smothered in a combination of cheddar and Monterrey jack cheeses. The behemoth is then covered with lettuce and tomatoes in a futile attempt to introduce a salad-healthy touch to this calorie bomb. It’s so big most people order the one-quarter size. It’s disgusting when you think about it. And irresistible.

When I told her I was starving, Izuanita bet me she could eat as much as I could, so we ordered a whole one and split it fifty-fifty.

When the last of the Disaster Burrito had disappeared, she said, “I told you I could finish my half.”

“You cheated,” I protested, “You gave some to Geronimo.”

“How could I resist those sad eyes?”

“He’s a shameless beggar; you shouldn’t encourage him. Where to now?”

“Home, James.”

“Your home or mine?” I asked.

“Isn’t that line supposed to be ‘Your
place
or mine’?”

She laughed and I laughed. Then she made a trip to the ladies room and returned with fresh lipstick and the shiniest red nails ever seen.

“Good thing the top’s down,” she said, “I can dry my nails.”

She hadn’t answered my question about which home she was to be taken to, and since I didn’t know where hers was, I drove back to mine. She turned the volume up and sat close to me. She put her arm around my back, and it was so long that her hand extended beyond the door. I didn’t know whether the object was to dry the nail polish or have her arm around me, although I suspected it was the former. Her right arm was extended in the opposite direction past Geronimo whose long neck was craned out to take in as much air as possible, and I suppose his coat was also being whipped by the wind, but thankfully none of it was lashing my face.