The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (11 page)

Someone in Old Town had their sink overflow while doing the dinner dishes, and the plumber they called to unclog their drains just happened to be the same one I’d seen three times on Titanium Trail where they were doing... what?

Installing a new water heater?

Maybe. Or maybe watching me watch Cantú’s condo?

But why?

I puzzled about it long into the night and all I got out of it was bags under my eyes the next day.

I called Martin at the tribal store the next morning and left him a message. When he called an hour later, I asked how much he wanted for his uncle’s pot. He told me twenty-five hundred, and I told him I had the money to buy it because I’d finally made a sale, a small plate from Santo Domingo that brought three thousand dollars.

He showed up around four that afternoon. There were three people in the store, a man and wife who were arguing about where to eat and their teenage daughter tuning them out in favor of something she was listening to via earphones.

Martin looked at the couple and said, “I come here trade pot for wampum.”

The arguing couple forgot their dispute, the husband grabbing his wife’s hand and leading her out. The teenage daughter remained. She took off the headphone and said, “Are you a real Native American?”

He said he was and she said, “This is so cool.”

“Would you like to buy the pot?” Martin asked her.

“My dumb parents never give me any money,” she said.

“Tiffany! Get out here immediately,” her mother called from out on the sidewalk.

“Can I have your autograph,” Tiffany asked Martin.

“Sure,” he said. “Where you want me to sign?”

She pulled her right sleeve up and handed Martin a black marker pen. “Right here,” she said, indicating a place on her shoulder. “Try to make it as even and level as you can. I’m going to have a tattoo artist trace over it before I wash it off, so what you write will be permanent.”

Martin hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and signed her shoulder while the parents looked on from outside in horror.

Tiffany sidled up to one of my display cases and looked at her shoulder’s reflection in the glass. “This will be the coolest tattoo in history. Thanks, Mister Bull,” she said and ran out overjoyed.

“Mr. Bull?” I said after she left.

“I signed it ‘Sitting Bull’,” he said.

I paid Martin the twenty-five hundred and placed the pot in one of the display cases with ‘five thousand dollars’ written on the discreet tented card in front of it. Like all the best restaurants, I write the prices out in words rather than numbers.

It was almost five, so Martin and I walked over to
Dos Hermanas
to meet Susannah who was happy to see him.

After Susannah and I had our margaritas and Martin his Tecate, he turned to me and asked, “You finish that book I gave you?”

“You gave it to me? I thought you just loaned it to me.”

“He’s on page five,” said Susannah.

“Good thing I gave it to you. The rate you reading it, I’ll never see it again.”

“I’m a potter, not a physicist.”

“It’s not written for physicists. It’s written for what you white people call the educated layman.”

“I’m white,” Susannah said, “and I’ve never called anybody that.”

That brought a chuckle from Martin.

“What did you get from the first five pages?” Martin asked me.

“If you throw an electron, you never know which way it might go.”

“You can’t throw electrons,” he replied.

“That’s what I told him,” said Susannah.

“What about those electron guns? They throw electrons.”

Martin nodded. “Suppose you throw a baseball at a piece of plywood. The ball makes a little dent in the wood. If you could duplicate that throw exactly with a second throw, you’d expect the ball to hit right in that first dent.”

“You haven’t seen him throw a ball,” Susannah interjected. “He couldn’t hit the plywood, much less the dent.”

“O.K.,” said Martin, “I’ll let you throw it.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“So you throw two baseballs exactly the same way, and they hit the same spot. Now imagine that instead of baseballs, we throw electrons.”

“Must be hard to get a two-seam grip on those puppies,” said Susannah. She and Martin had a fine laugh, and I took a sip of my margarita. I figured her remark was some sort of inside joke, but I wasn’t about to ask what it meant.

Martin continued, “Even if the electron gun is aimed exactly at the same place, the ‘dents’ are not the same. Each electron hits in a different place.”

Susannah shrugged. “So?”

“Doesn’t strike you as odd that two electrons start off in the same place, leave the gun at the same speed and end up at different locations?”

“Not really. The baseballs travel the same path because they’re big. But the electrons are so small they get pushed around by the wind or magnetic forces or light waves or something, so they get bumped off course.”

Martin looked at me. “I think you should give her the book.”

“I don’t want it,” she interjected before I could respond. Then she waved for Angie. While we were waiting for refills, she said, “Look at us. One part-time night student, one guy who got expelled, and one who dropped out at age thirteen, all having a grand time at the bar discussing subatomic particles. We need to get lives, guys.”

“This is life,” I said. “Part of life is about figuring things out.”

“Things that matter, Hubie. I guess people building nuclear reactors have to worry about electrons, but the rest of us have more important things to figure out.”

“I didn’t believe all triangles have interior angles equal to 180 degrees when Mr. Matthews told me that in the fourth grade. I figured there are so many different triangles – long skinny ones, squashed flat ones, etc. – that their interior angles couldn’t always be the same. But when he showed me the proof, it suddenly made sense to me.”

“Your fourth grade class did geometry proofs?” asked Martin.

“Not the whole class. Mr. Matthews gave extra sessions after school for kids that were interested in math, donating his own time. Sometimes he smelled of what I later came to realize was rye whisky, but in those days I just thought he was sleepy and had bad breath. But on the days when he was alert, it was like magic to me, the idea that you could prove something with absolute certainty.”

“I had teachers like that,” said Martin, “I would’ve stayed in school.”

“I wouldn’t have given up my after-school time,” said Susannah. “Proofs may be certain, but nothing in real life is, and that’s what makes it interesting.”

Geronimo was waiting for me. When I passed through the shop and then my workshop into my living quarters, I could hear him scratching at the patio door.

I popped the cork on a Gruet Blanc De Noir and opened a box of dog biscuits. I took a sniff and decided the biscuits didn’t go with champagne, so I grabbed a box of piñon brittle I’d bought from a shop a few doors to the east, the same one where I buy my piñon aftershave.

It was cool out in the patio. Geronimo sniffed the dog biscuits and came to the same conclusion I had. However, he was having them with water, not champagne, so I told him he’d have to make the best of it.

I sipped the Gruet and looked up at the stars. I opened the piñon brittle, and Geronimo looked up at me hopefully.

“Only after you finish your biscuit,” I told him, and damned if he didn’t wolf down the biscuit. He’s smarter than he looks.

I gave him a large piece of brittle, and when he crunched it, it flew in all directions. I guess that’s why they call it brittle. It didn’t faze him, though. He chewed the part he had bitten off and then went around picking up all the pieces with his sticky tongue. I swear he’s part anteater.

When I was a kid growing up, I used to sneak out of the house after my parents were asleep and lie in the grass and look up at the stars. There wasn’t as much light pollution back then, and you could see all the major constellations. The skies are not as clear now, but because there’s no moisture in the air and we’re a mile high, the atmosphere is still easier to see through than most urban locations, and the wall around my patio has a bit of the ‘well-effect’. So I sat there looking up at the twinkling stars and wondering if they were really composed of zillions of subatomic particles zooming around in random directions.

The champagne was cold and crisp and the piñon brittle hard and sweet, so I had a little more of each.

And woke up sometime in the middle of the night asleep in my lawn chair. Geronimo had taken advantage of my slumber to finish off the piñon brittle.

“You are grounded,” I told him as I staggered inside and slipped between my five-hundred-thread-count-long-staple cotton sheets.

I dreamed of Izuanita, but it would be less than gallant for me to share the details of that dream. I can say that at one point she was standing close to me with her long arms on my shoulders, her scent around me like a cloud from Xochimilco.

There was a rhythmic beating. Perhaps native drums. Perhaps my heart pounding at her nearness.

Perhaps someone at the door. I covered my head with one of my pillows (I sleep with four). Go away, I said telepathically to the early bird customer. I don’t care if I miss a sale, just go away.

But he kept pounding.

I rolled unsteadily out of bed, donned my robe and made it to the front door where I saw Whit Fletcher.

“You got a warrant,” I said after opening the door.

“What kind of question is that?” he asked, feigning hurt. “I drop by to see an old friend and you want to know if I got a warrant.” He shook his head in disappointment at my cynicism.

“O.K.,” I said, “no warrant. How about coffee?”

“Now that’s more like it,” he said. “I could use a good cup of Joe. How about you put the pot on?”

“I meant did you
bring
coffee,” I muttered to myself as he followed me back to my kitchen. I lit the fire under the coffee pot that I had primed the night before and excused myself for several morning ablutions.

When I returned, Whit had made himself comfortable in my willow chaise, so I took one of the less comfortable kitchen table chairs after pouring us both a cup of Café Bustelo, two bucks a pound at the grocery store and better than the stuff that sells for five times as much. It’s roasted to Latin American tastes and holds up well to a lot of cream and sugar.

“I been thinking about what you said before we went to the morgue,” 
he said.

“I said a lot of things before we went to the morgue, but none of them did any good because you made me go anyway.”

“I didn’t make you go. You was just doing your duty as a citizen.”

“Right.”

“What I’m talking about is when you asked me why we thought you might be able to ID the guy.”

“You said it was police business and nothing I needed to know.”

He pushed a mop of silver hair off his forehead. “That’s still true officially. Let’s agree right now that’s what you’ll say if anyone asks you about it.”

I nodded.

“Fact is, the dead guy was a pot collector. So naturally, we figured you’d know him.”

I felt a freshet of relief. Premature as it turned out.

“He collected those real old pots. You know those whatyamacallits – the ones you dig up illegally.”

“Anasazi,” I said.

He smiled at me. “If you didn’t know him, how’d you know he collected Anasazi?”

“You just said so.”

“I said whatyamacallits.”

“Nice try,” I said. “You also said the kind I dig up, and almost all of those are Anasazi.”

“That’s O.K., Hubert. I still think you know him, but I won’t press it.” He took a sip of his coffee. “How much one of those pots worth these days?”

So that’s why he’d come by, the scent of money. “Depends on its condition,” I said. “One in good shape can bring fifty thousand.”

He whistled softly in admiration of a fifty thousand dollar pot. “That guy you saw at the morgue – the one you say you didn’t know – he had twenty-five old pots. I don’t know if they was Anasazi or not. You’d be the one to know that. And I don’t know if they was in good shape. Most of ‘em had nicks and cracks and some had big pieces missin’, but maybe that’s good shape considering how old they are. I guess you’d be the one to know about that too. But I know there was twenty-five of ‘em because I counted them myself. And I can multiply pretty good, so I figure even if they weren’t all good enough to bring fifty thousand, that collection is worth at least half a million.”

I just sipped my coffee and said nothing.

“The way I figure it, those pots don’t have anything to do with him being poisoned —“

“Poisoned?”

“What’d you think? He died of natural causes?”

“I guess I just assumed he’d been shot or knifed or something.”

“You see any holes in him?”

“He was covered with a sheet, remember?”

“I guess you did have your eyes open after all. Anyway, if he’d been killed for the pots, they’d be gone. So if they weren’t the motive, then they ain’t evidence. I don’t know who has claim to them, but I figure nobody but the original collector knows exactly how many pots was in the collection, and if a few of the better ones were to go missing, what’s the harm? What I’m sayin’ is I may be able to lay my hands on a few of these pots and no one’s gonna squeal about it.”

I was still sipping coffee.

“But I’d need an expert to tell me the best ones to select. And I’d need someone to sell them. On the sly, so to speak. And you and me have done a few deals in the past that always worked out pretty good, so I was thinking…”

I didn’t hear what he was thinking because the coffee was gradually lifting the fog, and I realized that what he had already said implied that he had seen the collection.

When he stopped talking, I asked him when the guy had been poisoned.

“We found him on Sunday, but he hadn’t been doing any praying. Coroner said he’d been dead ten to twelve hours, so he must have died late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.”

The house had been empty on Thursday, three days
before
the police discovered the dead guy. My head started spinning. How had Whit seen the pots?