The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (14 page)

I drove slowly along Titanium Trail and looked at the houses with even numbers. They looked just like the ones with odd numbers – the same clusters of six, the same wrought iron numbers on the same plank doors, the same fake buttresses that had nothing to buttress, and the same ugly stucco, especially the mustard color.

The only difference was that the odd-numbered houses faced east, and that meant their rear windows faced west, and that meant...well, I already explained that.

I was in the Bronco because I figured everyone on the street would recognize Cantú’s Cadillac, and on top of that the Cadillac was no longer at my disposal because I had driven it nine miles away and parked it in a location where no state trooper or Albuquerque policeman would ever spot it.

Tristan’s garage opening gadget was on the passenger seat, and my old plastic warranty card was in my shirt pocket, the same one that had once briefly held twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills. Geronimo was in the back seat.

The first house was number 700. I parked on the street, connected the leash to Geronimo’s collar, led him up to the door, and told him to ring the doorbell.

He didn’t understand, so I pointed to the button and made encouraging remarks like,“Get it, boy,” and “Come on, up you go.” His primitive canine brain sensed I wanted him to do something, but all he did was just sway from side to side, which made his neck look floppy. Finally, he got the general idea and jumped up against the wall. When his paw failed to hit the button after several attempts, I lost patience and was reaching to ring it myself when the door flew open and a big hairy guy with no shirt and a gut hanging over his buckle said, “What the hell’s going on?”

“This dog is lost, and I’m trying to return him to his owner.”

He had a tattoo of a naked woman on his forearm but with all his body hair she looked more like a female orangutan with unusually large breasts. He looked at his door.

“The dog scratched my door.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s why I thought he might belong here. He wanted to get in.”

He took a half step towards me. “I should make you repaint it.”

“Actually, I’m just a volunteer working for the animal shelter, but if you call them, I’m sure they’ll send someone out to fix the door,” I said as I backed away.

“Yeah? What’s your name so I can tell them who was here.”

“Just tell them Chris. They’ll know who I am.”

I decided to wait on 702 until the ape in 700 had calmed down, gone back to sleep, or had just forgotten about me. He didn’t look like a guy with a good memory.

The last house was number 742, and I did it second. I shortened Geronimo’s leash and rang the bell myself. A smiling woman with ample lips and dimpled cheeks answered the door and smiled at me. I gave her my story about the lost dog, and she bent down and rubbed Geronimo behind the ears.

“He’s adorable,” she said, and you could tell he understood what she was saying about him. “He’s not mine,” she said, “I don’t own a pet. But if you can’t find his owner, I might be interested in adopting him.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep you in mind,” I said and started to leave.

“Wait, don’t you want to take my name and number just in case? Or maybe you have a form from the shelter I can fill out?”

“I forgot to bring any forms, but I’ll bring one back to you.”

“Won’t you need my address to do that?”

I glanced at the number on her door.

Her eyes followed mine, and she said, “How stupid of me. You already know it.”

Having sized her up as not the brightest
candelaria
on the
paseo
, I told her the dog’s tag had a picture of Indian pottery on it when we found him and did she know anyone in the neighborhood who collected Indian pots. She said she didn’t. She also said the only person she knew in the neighborhood who owned a dog was Darryl Brumby two doors down at number 738 who had a Rottweiler. I thanked her, made a mental note to skip 738, and went to 740.

No one was home. Same at 736.

The door at 734 was answered by a teenage girl who told me her mother was at work. I told her I was trying to find the owner of a lost dog. She asked me what the dog looked like. “Like this,” I said, pointing at Geronimo.

“Exactly like that?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ve seen another dog like that.”

I didn’t bother asking her whether she knew if any of her neighbors collected pottery because I didn’t want to explain to her what pottery is.

I had covered the six houses in the cluster at the end of the street. Or Trail. The two I’d seen into looked pretty much like Cantú’s place except the furniture was different. The pleasant lady at 742 had books on her shelves. The house with the teenager had an assortment of tchotchkes. I didn’t get a look into the two where no one was home, and I skipped the one with the Rottweiler because I had seen no evidence of a dog when I did the appraisal.

O.K., the real reason I skipped it was because I’m afraid of Rottweilers.

I drove around to the service drive to examine the two houses where no one had answered the door. The shade on the rear window at 740 was partway up. I peeked through at the shelves. A fish tank and a few odds and ends.

The shade was down at 736. I peeked in the garage; it was empty. I used Tristan’s device to open the garage door. Then I waited for several minutes in the Bronco with the engine running. The garage door was noisy as it went up, and if anyone was home and came to investigate, I wanted to make a quick getaway.

When no one came, I used my warranty card to loid the back door, doing so as quietly as possible. I stood silently behind the door and listened for any noise from within. Hearing none, I stepped inside, opened the swinging door, and looked at the shelves. Cabbage Patch dolls.

I closed the back door, closed the garage door, and drove home. I had used up my supply of nerve. The next cluster would have to wait for another day.

I was recharging my nerves that evening in
Dos Hermanas
and telling Susannah about my initial attempt to determine where the reclusive collector lived.

“She actually bought the story that his tags had a picture of an Indian pot?” She asked.

“I was just a friendly volunteer from the animal shelter. Why would I lie to her?”

“You need a better cover story. The rest of the residents of Titanium Trail may not be so gullible.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You could be a door-to-door salesman.”

“I don’t think I’d make a good salesman.”

“You run a store, Hubert.”

“Yeah, but I don’t sell things. I mean, I have things for sale, and if people buy them, that’s good, but I don’t actually try to
sell
things.”

“A retail shop run by a guy who doesn’t like to sell things. I have to admit that’s a novel business plan.”

“It’s a lot better than going door to door and trying to talk someone into buying a...What would I be selling?”

“You wouldn’t be selling anything. It’s just a cover story.”

“But I’d have to be selling
something
. I can’t just say, ‘Hi, I’m a door-to-door salesman. Any of your neighbors collect Indian pottery?’”

“You could sell pots! No one’s going to buy one of course, but it would give them the chance to tell you if there’s a collector in the neighborhood.”

“I think I’ll stick with the lost dog story.”

“Why do you need any kind of story to begin with? I thought you were going to get the address from Whit.”

“He wouldn’t give it to me.”

“How can you steal the pots for him if he won’t tell you where they are?”

“He thinks I already know where they are. When I asked him for the address, he said, ‘You already know the address. And I’m going to give you some unofficial advice that you never heard from me. Don’t go back there.’ Then he hung up.”

She stared at me while the wheels turned. “Have you figured out why he said that?”

I shook my head and waved for Angie.

“It doesn’t sound good,” she ventured.

“Yeah. That’s why I hid the Cadillac. It’s also why I went looking for my copies. I have a really bad premonition about this whole thing.”

“Why didn’t you just take the Cadillac back and park it in Cantú’s garage like you said you were going to do?”

“Because I’m trying to extricate myself from this affair, and it’s obvious the car’s been hotwired.”

“So it’s been hotwired. The cops would never connect you with something technical like that.”

“I know that, but your fingerprints are probably all over the car, and if they discover that, they’ll know I’m involved.”

“They won’t need fingerprints to know you had the car. It sat around your shop for several days, and Izuanita will tell them you took her for a ride in it.”

“I don’t even know her last name, and the cops have no reason to know she exists. And if they don’t get suspicious about the car to begin with, they won’t go asking people if they’ve seen it near my shop.”

“I can see you’ve been thinking about this. What’s our plan?”

“Can you take out the switch you installed and unhotwire the thing?”

“Sure. The switch is just hanging from the ignition wires; it’s not like I drilled a hole in the dash. I’ll just remove the switch and splice the wires back together.”

“And they won’t be able to tell it’s been hotwired?”

“Not unless they look under the dash at the wires, and why would they do that if they had no reason to?”

I began to relax a little after Susannah explained the hotwire repair. We could return the car to the garage, wipe off the whole thing to remove any fingerprints, and the car couldn’t connect me to Cantú or the dead collector. Then I could retrieve my three copies so they couldn’t connect me either, and I’d be home free. I’d even be ahead eventually because after the collection had been sorted out by the police, the probate court, or whatever, I could quietly sell the copies.

I don’t know why I suddenly had such a strong urge to disentangle myself. After all, I had invested a lot of time and effort, recreating my blindfolded ride, staking out Cantú’s place, pretending to be a volunteer from the animal shelter, and even taking a car for ransom. During all that time I had seen it as an effort to recover my appraisal fee and, with Whit’s help, maybe get a large supplement to that fee. But now I was sitting there looking at Susannah across the table and wishing I’d never gotten involved.

Maybe it was Whit thinking I knew the collector’s address and warning me not to go there. Maybe it was just nerves from playing the role of a shelter volunteer and loiding my way into someone else’s house. I hate doing that. My stomach was knotted up like macramé. Or maybe it was just a premonition.

The premonition followed me home and spent the night with me.

Even though weekends are normally Big Breakfast Days for me, I didn’t feel like making the effort, so the next morning I hit the brew switch on the coffeemaker and walked down to Alfredo’s where I bought some
churros
.

I was sitting in the patio eating the
churros
, drinking hot black Bustelo coffee, and reflecting on how Alfredo’s was always crowded on Saturday mornings when the obvious finally hit me—most people don’t work on Saturdays.

I packed a picnic lunch and put it, Tristan’s magic garage opener, and Martin’s book on Einstein in the Bronco and drove to
Casitas del Bosque
. I took Geronimo along, but this time he wasn’t part of my disguise.

I nudged the Bronco slowly over the curb and parked up against the bank of the irrigation canal that ran parallel to Platinum Place just where it intersected Titanium Trail. A large catalpa shaded the area, and that’s where I set up my lawn chair and tied Geronimo to the tree.

It was a hot summer day, but the dry desert air was cool under the tree, and I had a good view of the entire street. I spent about an hour drinking coffee from a thermos and reading about the uncertainty principle. Then Geronimo and I went behind a willow thicket to do what a dog does on three legs and a man on two.

After we came back, several cars came by and a couple of them gave me a quizzical look. It occurred to me that perhaps the area under the trees was part of the communal property of
Casitas del Bosque
, so I decided to check with the nice lady at
casita numero
742 to make sure I wasn’t going to be asked to leave by the neighborhood patrol.

When she opened the door and saw it was me, she said with a smile, “Did you come back to tell me I can adopt him?”

“Uh, no,” I replied. “It’s too soon.”

She looked disappointed.

“We give the owner a certain number of days to claim the animals before we allow them to be adopted.”

“How many days?”

“Uh, I’m not certain.”

“Oh, right. You told me you’re new at this.”

“Right. The reason I stopped by was I wanted to ask you if you thought it would be O.K. if the two of us had a sort of picnic over there under the trees.”

“That would be great. Just let me put on some shoes,” she said and left me standing there like an idiot as she went back into the house.

I looked at Geronimo and said, “You understood that the two of us meant you and me, right?”

He nodded.

She was gone so long I began to suspect she’d lost her shoes, but she finally came back to the door with shoes, lemonade, and
biscochitos
.

After we shared the lunch I’d brought, I let Geronimo off his leash and he went for a swim in the canal, plopped down afterwards in the dirt, and woke up an hour later looking like the company mascot for a regiment of those mud soldiers they dug up in China. Or a clay anteater.

When my companion from number 742 with ample lips and dimpled cheeks saw Geronimo’s condition, she went back to her house and returned with an old blanket. I took the dog back to the canal and threw him in. He paddled around for a few minutes, and then I winched him out, but this time I held the leash tight and kept him off the dirt. Miss Lips, as I had come to think of her, spread the blanket around the trunk of the catalpa like the apron around a Christmas tree, and I tied Geronimo to the tree with the leash shortened enough that he couldn’t get off the blanket. After Miss Lips had rubbed his ears a while, he went to sleep.

“What will you do if someone comes along and claims to be the owner?” she asked.

“I’ll give him his dog and go back to the shelter.”

She looked alarmed. “But what if it’s not really the owner?”

I didn’t know what to say and I said it.

“It could be a bad person,” she said, as if this would help me know what to do.

“You know,” she continued, “like someone who does experiments on animals.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

“Doesn’t the shelter have rules about that?”

“I’m not sure. I’m just a volunteer.”

“Maybe you need a sign.”

“A sign?” I pictured a man claiming ownership of the dog and then a white dove flying by as a sign that the man was not someone who collected animals for evil cosmetic companies to test their products on.

“Yeah, like ‘Is this your dog?’” she explained.

“Oh, that kind of sign.”

“I can cut out the side of a cardboard box and nail it to a tomato stake, and we could write on it with a Sharpie.”

I couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a plausible objection to the sign. After all, if I was trying to find the owner, I could hardly object to a sign that would help me do so. As she walked back to her house, I thought about that old saying about the webs we weave when we lie. I had made up what I thought was a harmless deception to help me find the collector’s address, and now I was trapped in it.

When Miss Lips came back, I noticed as she approached that her lips were not the only ample part of her anatomy. She was about as different from Izuanita as a woman could be – short, pudgy, pigeon-toed, and round-faced. Yet attractive in her own way.

“I’m sorry,” I said as she sat down next to me, “but I don’t know your name.”

She smiled at me and said, “I’m Dolly Aguirre.”

“I’m Hubert Schuze, but my friends call me Hubie. Is Dolly a nickname?”

“Nope. It’s on my birth certificate, Dolly Madison Aguirre. My father taught American history.”

“Oh my God! Did he teach at Albuquerque High?”

“Yep. And you’re going to tell me you had him as a teacher, right?”

“I did. Frank Aguirre, right?”

She smiled and nodded.

“Is he still teaching?”

“Oh no, he retired years ago. In fact, he lives with me. You want to come over and say hello?”

Oops. There was that deceptive web thing again. Oh well, it’s not like Mr. Aguirre was going to call the animal shelter to check up on whether I volunteered there. And what would he do if he found out I told a white lie to his daughter, go back and change my grade to an F?

I told her I thought I should stay at my post in case the owner happened to drive by, but that I’d like to talk to her dad another time, and she agreed that made sense. We sat together on the blanket and passed a pleasant Saturday afternoon talking, eating
biscochitos
, and drinking lemonade. I also watched the comings and goings of the residents of Titanium Trail.

It turned out Dolly had also had her father as a teacher, and that had proved awkward for her and him and for the other students who always assumed she didn’t have to work for her grades. She told me she did in fact get a break from her dad on her grade. He gave her a D even though she thought she had failed.

Dolly had been at Albuquerque High as a freshman when I was a senior, but she didn’t remember me, probably because I didn’t play sports. The only people you can remember almost thirty years after you leave high school are the girls you dated – or in my case, the ones I wanted to date – and the sports stars. I didn’t remember her either, but then who pays attention to freshmen?

I continued to keep one eye on the comings and goings of her neighbors while we talked, and around five she said she needed to check up on her father. Then she asked me if I’d like to have Sunday dinner at her house the next evening and get a chance to visit with her dad. I hesitated ever so slightly in answering because I wondered briefly whether she was asking me for a date, but I said yes, and after she left I thought about it and realized that it might be a pleasant evening either way, so it didn’t matter.

I stayed under the catalpa until around seven then drove home. I put Geronimo out in the patio, put a bookmarker in Martin’s book on page fifteen, and made myself a large plate of
nachos
with fresh roasted jalapeños on top.

The house I had finally focused on was number 730. No one had come and gone all day, the air conditioner wasn’t on, and no light had shone through any window at any point during the day. I was there again now that it was getting dark, and I sat in the Bronco as day turned to night and lights flickered on everywhere except number 730. An hour after full dark, I drove slowly to the garage and opened it. I loided the door and stood listening. Nothing.

By this time, I knew the floor plan like I lived there. I also knew the house was empty. The air was hot and stale. I turned left as I entered the door from the garage, pushed open the swinging door, turned right and then looked right to the shelves. The moon was not yet up, but even with the faint ambient light I could see the pots. I took my three copies one at a time out to the Bronco and put them in three boxes I had brought for that purpose. I pushed newspaper around them gently to pad them for their ride back to Old Town.

My portion of the ancient adobe I call home was in serious disrepair when I bought it. The rear portion that is now my residence had a hundred year backlog of deferred maintenance. My remodel included removing everything down to the original adobe bricks and putting plaster over every square inch of wall. The result was organic and irregular as adobe structures should be. And seamless except for two expansion joints. But they aren’t there for expansion purposes. I put them there because when you turn and press the wall sconce just to the left of them in a certain way, a plastered panel swings out on invisible hinges, and that is where I hide pots that cannot be displayed in public. And that’s where I put the three copies when I got home.