The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (20 page)

I was anxious to erase the event from my life, so after Susannah drove me home from the hospital, I took a long shower then ate an even longer breakfast.

I gathered all the papers from the hospital on my kitchen table and added them up, certain that the accounting department had made an error. They had not. The ambulance service, emergency room examination, one night in a regular room for “observation,” lab fees, doctors charges, and a number of petty miscellaneous charge such as a box of tissues came to just under five thousand dollars.

I wondered again about the uncertainty principle. I knew I was never going to understand it. The bullet that was headed for my heart had followed a path that was determined precisely by the angle of the gun. Fortunately, it stayed on that path and ended up in
The Book
. In chapter 37 to be exact, which was thirty-six chapters farther than I had gotten.

According to the uncertainty principle, if that bullet had been an electron, it might have swerved unpredictably, missed
The Book
and hit me directly. Of course a single electron wouldn’t have left a big bruise on my chest.

It didn’t make sense. The bullet, after all, is just a collection of millions of electrons and other subatomic particles. If they are all moving around at random, how come the bullet doesn’t do the same?

I decided I had wasted enough time on the uncertainty principle, and I turned my thoughts to two much more practical problems – who shot me and would they try it again? I thought about my futile search for clues in Cantú’s Cadillac convertible. I remembered thinking that the difficulty was that anything could be a clue, so how would you know one if you saw one? With that in mind, I found a yellow pencil and a yellow notepad and listed everything I could think of that might be connected to my involvement with Cantú’s collection and/or with my being shot. The list ran three pages. I read over it several times. The list got shorter each time because I marked out some items that appeared on review to be irrelevant. But the list didn’t just lose length. It gained coherence. I began to see how some of the things might fit together. I was developing a theory.

I heard someone knocking at the front door. When I peered through the peephole, I saw Izuanita at the door of the shop.

Maybe it was Susannah describing her as “deformed” or Chris’ description of her as a “Modigliani woman,” but whatever it was, she looked a little different. She still looked long and lean, and she still made me feel libidinous, but her face seemed further off kilter than I remembered and her prominent bone structure more conspicuous and slightly less charming than I recalled. Or maybe it was just the negativity of having spent the night in the hospital.

I did not open the door. For one thing, I had enjoyed my time with Dolly. For another, I didn’t want Izuanita just dropping by at her convenience. I wanted her to call me. She could do that. I’m in the book. But was she? I had no idea, but I decided to find out. If I didn’t answer the door and she wanted to see me, she’d have to call.

Then what? At least I’d have her number. Or at least I would if I had one of those phones that displays the numbers of your callers and keeps a record of them. I called Tristan, and he came over with a phone that had a little screen on it.

“But if she looks me up in the book,” I said, “she’ll call the old phone.”

He shook his head. “Your number doesn’t change when you replace your land line.”

“I know that. This is not the first phone I’ve ever had. But I thought this fancy one with the screen was like your cell phone.”

“It has some of those functions, but you can ignore them. Just use it like your regular phone.”

He pulled his berry phone out of a little holster on his belt and dialed. My new phone rang. His number showed up on the screen. Black magic.

That evening, someone knocked on my door. I looked through the peephole to see Izuanita staring through the glass with her hands together over her eyes like a visor to block out the reflection. Instead of going to the door, I willed her to call me.

On Sunday morning I had my normal weekend breakfast, an event that took so long to cook and so long to consume that it was noon by the time I finished.

Of course the fact that I slept until ten was a contributing factor.

After I washed the dishes, I walked to the Special Collections Branch of the Albuquerque Public Library on the corner of Central and Edith. I needed to walk off the
chorizo
, and I enjoy seeing the building, a beautiful old adobe with the traditional New Mexico palette of sand-colored stucco and turquoise-painted doors and window trim where I spent a good deal of my youth exploring the world of information. I would hoist a heavy volume of one of the reference works onto one of the massive oak tables and thumb through until something caught my fancy. It was long before I learned the origin of ‘fancy free’, but that’s what I was back then. I particularly loved reading about faraway places and the customs of different peoples. I should have guessed I’d end up an anthropologist. I think one reason travel doesn’t interest me is that real travel can never measure up to the trips I took in my imagination to those faraway places.

That and the fact that I’m afraid to fly and don’t like crowds.

I read a book about Einstein. Not about science, about the man. In addition to being the smartest person who ever lived (that’s what the book claimed), he also had a great sense of humor. Two sayings attributed to him stuck in my mind because they seemed relevant to the theory I was developing about Cantú’s pots and my being shot.

The first was, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I had pared down my list of clues. What I needed to do now was put them in the simplest arrangement possible that made sense.

The second saying was, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Einstein’s words described my situation almost perfectly. The only minor emendation I would make would be, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and
male
stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

When I got home, two numbers were showing on the screen. I called Tristan and he looked them up in his reverse directory. As the name implies, a reverse directory allows you to look up a number and find the person’s name rather than the other way around. If you’re thinking that would be a handy thing to have, be advised that they are illegal unless you are the FBI or the CIA.

Or Tristan. Actually, his is also illegal, but evidently there is no risk in his having it because it’s in something called an encrypted file in his computer. And it’s only for New Mexico exchanges, not an area high on the list for FBI or CIA surveillance.

One of the numbers on my new phone was from out of state, so Tristan couldn’t look it up, but he guessed it was from a telemarketer.

The other number was a 505 area code, so he could look that one up. It was a number from Santa Fe rather than Albuquerque, and it was assigned to Oscar and Izuanita Perez.

Hmm.

While I was digesting that information, I heard a knock, and looked through the peephole expecting to see Izuanita. She seemed determined to contact me in person rather than by phone. But it was Father Groaz.

“Hallow, Youbird. I heard yesterday that you had been assaulted. I went to the hospital, but they told me you had been released. You are not seriously injured?”

After I gave him the details of what happened, he smiled and said, “Too bad wass not a Bible. Would be a better story.”

I told him about my conversation with Miss Gladys and the fact that she had spurned T. Morgan Fister’s proposal of marriage.

“Wass probably wisdom for her to do so.”

I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t, so I told him he had given me sound advice about saying nothing to her. He just nodded.

Then he came back to my situation. “Being shot is vary serious, Youbird. I know you received only a bruise, but how is your state of mind?”

“Good, I think. I know I was incredibly lucky, but I try not to read too much into that. Maybe it was the Hand of God, but I’m inclined not to see it that way. If God wanted me to keep on living, he could have done it less dramatically by just not having someone shoot at me in the first place. I don’t think God needs to grandstand.”

“I don’t know, Youbird. Parting the Red Sea was vary dramatic.”

He stared at me briefly then let out that loud belly laugh of his. When he stopped laughing, he said, “God hass a plan, but we do not know all the details. Some things happen because God makes them happen. Some things happen because He gave us free will. And some things are just luck.”

I thought about that after he left. I believed someone had acted freely to shoot me, so there was the free will part. I believed the bullet hitting the book was a happy accident, so there as the luck part. I tended to believe that God had better things to do than have a bullet shot at me and land in a book, but I kept an open mind.

I called Izuanita and she said she had dropped by several times, and she asked me where I had been. She seemed a little perturbed that I wasn’t at her beck and call. Then she asked how I got her phone number, and I said it showed up on my phone when she called. Then I told her I was sorry to have missed her and that I was glad she had come by, and her tone softened a bit.

So I asked her for a date. Unlike my invitation to Dolly, I actually used the word ‘date’.

“Sure,” she said, “I’d like that.”

But when I said I’d come by for her at seven the next night, she said it would be easier for her if she met me at my place. I had been hoping that Oscar Perez was her father, the two of them sharing a house and a phone number like Dolly and her father, but the fact that she didn’t want me to pick her up supported the other idea I had.

She was married. No wonder she never told me where she lived. No wonder she just dropped in on me at random times without calling first. I had to hide behind my peephole pretending not to be home and use Tristan’s wizardry just to get her phone number. Of course, in fairness, I’d never asked her for it. Maybe I was afraid it would seem too forward or, worse, that she would refuse to give it to me. Or maybe I had a subconscious suspicion and didn’t want to know.

I have a Santa Fe phone book, so I decided to look up Oscar and Izuanita and see where they lived. There were about two pages of Perez’s, but no Oscar and no Izuanita. Their phone must have been unlisted.

I closed the book and thought for a while. Then I opened the Santa Fe phone book again and looked up something else. It was listed.

Whit Fletcher walked into my shop early Monday morning and said, “You got something against the Cantú family, Hubert?”

“Well, let’s see. The father stole my appraisal fee, I had to look at his corpse, and then I got falsely arrested for killing him. As far as the son goes, I didn’t much like him the first time I met him, and then he disappeared when I needed some information from him. So I’m not planning to send Segundo Cantú a Christmas card this year.”

“He wouldn’t get it if you did. He’s dead.”

“I meant the son.”

“He’s dead too.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Murder’s never funny, Hubert.”

“The son was murdered?”

“You should know,” he said, and then he started reading me my rights. I was sputtering and interrupting him but he just kept on reading.

“Come on, Whit, you already messed up when you arrested me the first time. Why make the same mistake again?”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with that first arrest. In fact, I told them I didn’t think you did it, but your fingerprints were on the glass with the poison in it. That’s pretty good evidence. If you didn’t have that slick lawyer, you’d probably be in prison now, and then you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to kill the son.”

The situation was so bizarre that I half-believed it was a prank. “I didn’t kill the son,” I said in exasperation.

“He says you did.”

“How can he say anything if he’s dead?”

Whit pushed a handful of silver hair off his forehead. “I got to get me a haircut. He didn’t say it. He wrote it. See, after you left, he wrote a note just before he kicked the bucket. This here’s just a copy.”

I looked at the paper he handed me. It was a photocopy of a book on a floor. The book was open and across the print on the page were written the words, “Schuze did it.”

“That book was on the floor next to him. He musta’ been reading it when you shot him.”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“Not enough anyway. You’re not cut out for this kind of work, Hubert. See, what you should have done is shoot him in the head to make sure he was dead. That first shot severed a major artery, but he probably lived a couple of minutes, just long enough to write in that book.”

“I don’t own a gun. I wouldn’t even know how to shoot one.”

“Well, you did miss his heart, but you come pretty close for a beginner.”

“When was he shot?”

“Coroner’s best guess is Saturday night.”

“Then it couldn’t have been me,” I said excitedly. “I was shot Saturday night. You know that because you saw me in the hospital the next morning.”

“Not this Saturday, Hubert. Last Saturday. And the thing is, not only did Cantú leave that note I just showed you, but one of the neighbors saw you coming out of the house in the middle of the night.”

Oops. That was the night I had retrieved my three copies. Was Cantú dead on the floor in another room while I was wrapping my copies in bubble wrap?

“Where did you find him?”

“In the living room, right in front of those pots, which by the way three of them was missing. But don’t worry. I didn’t say anything about that to anybody.”

Why do these things happen to me? I could prove Cantú was not dead on the living room floor of his father’s house last Saturday because I was there burgling the place. Although I didn’t see it as burglary because the copies were mine.

“If he was killed more than a week ago and that note was next to him, how come you’re just now arresting me?”

“When he was killed is just the coroner’s estimate. We didn’t find the body until yesterday when we got a call from a neighbor complaining about a strange smell coming from the house.”

My stomach convulsed with nausea. I sat down on the stool and dropped my head into my hands. Whit brought me a glass of water. After I drank the water and my head cleared, I looked up at Whit and told him to get a chair. He sat down next to me, and I told him the whole story, including the parts I had pieced together.