The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (21 page)

After Whit left, I packed a picnic basket, put Geronimo in the Bronco, and drove east through Tijeras Canyon. Then I turned north and took the winding road up to the crest of the Sandia Mountains.

I was about a mile from the top when the Bronco vapor locked. Those of you who began driving after the introduction of fuel injection will not know what a vapor lock is.

Come to think of it, neither do I. I just know that the carburetor stops sending gasoline to the engine, and the only thing you can do is wait until the temperature and pressure go up or down or stabilize or whatever it is they do. I left the vehicle on the side of the road, donned a jacket and hat, and walked to the summit. I was already on the massif, the steepest part of the road well behind me, but I was winded when I got to the top. It was only a mile, but oxygen is scarce at 10,000 feet.

I hiked along the rim until I came to an old bristlecone pine I’m fond of. I’m told it was growing in that spot when Caesar was ruling the Roman Empire. The oldest living thing on earth is a bristlecone pine in California dated at about five thousand years old. The one in front of me was just a youngster. Still, I enjoy seeing it, windswept and gnarled, impassively rooted in a harsh environment. It puts things in perspective.

I don’t get up there much because it’s a long and winding road and too cold and icy in the winter. There’s a tramway to the crest from the west side of the mountains in Albuquerque. In fact, it’s the world’s longest tramway at almost three miles.

They can take it down so far as I’m concerned. There’s no way I’m getting in a little box suspended hundreds of feet above the ground and held by a skinny cable. Everyone else seems to like it though.

I stared out over the Rio Grande Valley. A plaque by the tramway claims the view from up there covers eleven thousand square miles. It looks even larger. I turned back to the bristlecone for one last dose of perspective only to see Geronimo lift his leg and pee on it.

Talk about perspective.

We walked down to the Bronco to find the vapor had unlocked, and I drove back to Albuquerque and my date with Izuanita.

“Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took, and loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

I remembered that phrase skipping across my mind when she’d first walked into my shop. An Aztecan goddess. A half-truth as it turned out.

She was still tall and thin with skin the color of cinnamon. Her hair was long and straight, her eyes big and dark. Her mouth was wide and her lips candy-apple red. She had long legs and long arms, and she was wearing the same sundress she’d worn that first day, revealing those same lovely long limbs. A large cotton bag was slung over her shoulder. She took her sunglasses off, dropped them into the bag, and smiled at me.

“I don’t smell anything cooking,” she said teasingly.

“I was too nervous to cook.”

“Then we’re going out. Great. Can we take the Cadillac?”

“I’m curious,” I said. “Did the Cadillac belong to your father or your brother?”

The smile slid off her face and her big round eyes narrowed.

“How did you know?”

“When you put the top down, you reached for the latches without looking for them first. You knew right where the switch was.”

She smiled again. “Yeah, I had to lean over you to reach it. Did you know I was flirting with you?”

“A guy has to hope.”

She laughed. “You’re fun to be with, Hubie.”

“You didn’t tell me whose car it was.”

“It was my father’s.” She shuddered.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“He was a bastard. I’m glad he’s dead.”

“Wow,” I said softly.

She looked down at the floor. “He was a drug dealer in Mexico. A rival gang drove by our house one night and shot out all the windows. My mother and one of my father’s bodyguards were killed. My brother and I weren’t there. We were in boarding school in Santa Fe. The next week my father immigrated to Albuquerque. We’ve never been back to Mexico.”

Only when she stopped talking did she look up.

“There was a time when I thought you killed my father.”

“The police thought so, too.”

“We were both wrong. I guess I knew that all along. My heart told me you couldn’t do it.”

“Who did?”

She looked at the hardwood again. When her face came up, tears were flowing. I handed her my handkerchief. She dabbed her cheeks then took a deep breath.

“My brother killed him. He was a drug addict. There’s a certain poetic justice in that, don’t you think? A drug dealer’s son ruined by drugs. My father never had time for me, but he worshipped Segundo. When he found out he was taking drugs, he beat him. Segundo was about sixteen then. When the beatings didn’t help, he put him in all sorts of programs. He’d stay clean for a few weeks or a few months, then...” Her voice trailed off.

“Finally,” she said, “Dad decided to simply write him off. He stopped helping him. He stopped supporting him. Segundo came to me frantic, wanted me to talk dad into giving him more money for a cure, but I knew what he wanted the money for. You could see it in those jittery eyes. Dad spent a fortune on treatments. He even bought Segundo a house in the neighborhood so he could keep an eye on him. Let him drive his precious Cadillac.”

“Was it late last fall when your father cut off Segundo?”

“How did you know that?”

“Because Segundo came to my shop in December with one of your dad’s pots. He paid me five thousand dollars to copy it.”

“Where would he get five thousand dollars?”

“The pot he brought was worth fifty thousand. He probably agreed to sell the pot to a collector who gave him the five thousand as an advance.”

I could almost see the wheels turning. “He needed the copy to put on the shelf so Dad wouldn’t realize the original was missing.”

“I wouldn’t have copied it if I knew that was the plan. I thought the pot was his.”

She was shaking her head as I spoke. “I had it all wrong; I thought you and Segundo were working together. He would steal the pots and you’d sell them.”

“So you decided to spy on me and see what you could find out. Your husband is a plumber, right?”

She stared at me.

“It was you in that van watching me. But why? So what if your brother was ripping off your father. You said you hated him.”

Her face darkened. “Those pots are mine, Hubert. He spent a fortune on my brother while I had to pinch pennies. Those pots were my share of the inheritance. Segundo had already gotten his half –
more
than his half. When he started in on the pots, I knew I had to stop him. I confronted him and told him I was going to tell Dad about him stealing the pots.” She spoke in a low but forceful voice, the rage contained just below the surface.

“And that’s when he killed your father?”

“Yes. And ran away like the coward he’s always been. He told me the whole story last Saturday. He had gone to Dad and told him you had stolen the pots and replaced them with copies. Dad bought it because apparently you have a reputation as a pot thief. He said he had a plan to trap you. He would lure you there under the guise of wanting an appraisal and they’d get your fingerprints on a glass. So when they called the police to charge you with stealing the pots, they could prove you’d been there because your prints would be on one of Dad’s glasses.”

“But the real plan was to frame me for your father’s murder.”

She nodded.

“But after he killed your father, why didn’t he take the pots?”

She gave me a cynical smile I’d not seen on her before. “I’m surprised you couldn’t figure that out. You seem to know everything else.”

“Maybe I did figure it out. He wanted me to take the rap. If the pots are gone, they’ll search my place after I’m arrested and find out I don’t have them, and that will weaken their case. But if the pots are still there, their theory would be that I was going to go back later and get them. After all, it takes a lot of time to properly wrap and box twenty-five valuable pots.”

I was thinking I’d propounded a theory along those lines to Susannah after I found the pots weren’t in the first house even though Whit had seen them
after
I was there, but my recollection was muddled by the margaritas I’d been knocking back that night.

“So your brother finally came back to get the pots, you confronted him, and he told you the whole story, even admitting he’d killed your father.”

She reached into her bag.

“Why would he do that,” I asked.

“Because I had a gun on him,” she answered in a flat voice.

I believed her. She had one on me. I don’t know anything about guns, but I was pretty certain the gun she pulled out of her bag was a .38 caliber.

And I didn’t have any books in my pockets this time to stop a bullet.

“I had to kill him, Hubie. He would have taken every penny of my inheritance. Can you imagine what it’s like growing up knowing your father is a drug dealer? Knowing he was responsible for your mother’s death? The only think I clung to over the years was the fact that at least I’d get something out of him when he died. And then Segundo started draining him dry. I had to kill him. I had to.”

“Just like you have to kill me?”

Shoot, I thought to myself. I didn’t mean it as a directive to her. I said it to myself because I was upset that when I said that dramatic line – “Just like you have to kill me” – my voice cracked. I had hoped to be calm like Bogart.

“I’m sorry, Hubie. I really do like you. But I was afraid you’d figure it out. All those years I’ve waited, all that deprivation I’ve suffered can’t be for nothing.”

What’s he waiting for? I thought to myself. Sure, I’m wearing a Kevlar vest, but I knew from recent experience that being shot is no fun even if the bullet doesn’t penetrate. I was just glad that she was aiming at my body.

Then the door to the workshop swung open, and Whit Fletcher was aiming at Izuanita’s body.

“Drop the weapon, Miss.”

It’s a good thing I have that peephole. A second later and I would’ve had another bruise on my chest.

It was an unusually slow night at
Dos Hermanas
.

Tuesdays are often slow, but this was the height of the tourist season. Maybe the tourists were all riding the tramway that evening. The view is said to be spectacular at night.

“I can’t believe you went along with the Kevlar vest plan,” she said between bites of a chip. “No offense, Hubie, but you’re not much of a risk taker.”

“Having her confront me with a cop looking through my peephole was a lot less risky than not knowing when and where she might try to ambush me again.”

“Still, I just can’t picture you standing there calmly as she pulled that pistol out of her bag.”

“She told me about killing her brother. ‘I had to kill him’, she said. And I said, ‘Just like you have to kill me?’”

I didn’t tell her my voice cracked.

“I still don’t quite understand how you figured it out.”

We were on the veranda under an orange sky.

“Neither do I.”

I pulled out my list of clues and waved it above the table. “I wrote down everything related to the pots and Cantú. Then I weeded it down, crossing out things that didn’t seem relevant.”

“I don’t see any crossing out marks,” she said, taking the list and scanning it.

“Well, every time I eliminated something, I rewrote a new list on a fresh piece of paper.”

She sighed. “That is so you, Hubie. What’s this one – ‘driver’s accent’?”

“Ahh. That one I owe to your suggestion that I might be able to identify the driver by his voice.”

“So you remembered where you’d heard that voice?”

“Not exactly. I don’t think I could have identified the voice just by remembering it. But when I speculated who it might be, I realized it sounded like Segundo Cantú.”

That’s the way the process had gone. I’d look at one thing on the list, give it a tentative explanation or meaning, then test that by seeing how it would affect the significance of other things on the list. It was like a ball of string – no particular place to start, but everything connected in some way.

“Here’s how I think it went with the driver. When I figured out that Izuanita had some connection with the Cantú family because of her familiarity with the Cadillac, I asked myself if she might have been the driver.”

Susannah got that expectant enthusiastic look she gets when she shifts into her murder mystery mode. “You dismissed my suggestion that the driver might be a woman,” she said with a triumphant smile.

“You’re right. I should have taken your suggestion more seriously because trying out Izuanita as the driver led me to realize it was the son.”

“How did you eliminate Izuanita?”

“Two things. First, every time she was near me, her long flowing hair would brush against me; that never happened on my blindfolded ride.”

“She could have had it up.”

“Right, but the driver held my arm as we walked up to the door, and his hands were bigger than Izuanita’s.”

“So if it wasn’t her, how did it help?”

“Because while I was considering her as the driver, I asked myself if her voice would be right.”

“If she lowered her voice like I suggested when I said it might be a woman?”

“Right. And it worked. When I imagined her voice in a lower register, I realized it would fit with the driver’s voice. It was succinct and clipped like the driver. And Hispanic, but not like the accents you normally hear here.”

“So you realized her voice was like the driver’s voice only higher.”

“Right. And then—“

“You realized that she sounded like a female version of Segundo the Segundo.”

“Exactly.”

“So you figured they must be siblings.”

“Yeah, and that fit with a bunch of other things on the list.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the last time I saw Wilkes, we were talking about what would happen to the pots. Carl was hoping he could sell them for the heirs, and he told me Cantú had two children. I took a guess that their names were Primero and Segundo, and Wilkes said he knew the son was named after the father, so he was Segundo. Then he said he didn’t know the other name but would wager it wasn’t Primero.”

Susannah did that thing with her shoulders, pushing them forward to show confusion. “And that means what?”

“I assumed the other name wasn’t Primero because you normally name the first child after the father. So the first child was named Segundo, and under that circumstance, you certainly wouldn’t name the second child Primero.”

“This is giving me a headache. Let’s get another round.”

I agreed that was an excellent idea, and Angie was there in a flash since she didn’t have many customers to tend to.

After we had our new drinks and fresh chips and salsa, Susannah said, “So where were we? Oh, right, the Primero shall be Segundo and the Segundo shall be Primero.”

“In this case, that wouldn’t surprise me. But the reason the second child couldn’t be named Primero—“

“Is because it would have to be Primera. She was a girl! I told you Primero did it. I just didn’t realize Primero was a Primera.”

I nodded assent.

“You should have figured that one out sooner.”

“Why?”

“Because you said Wilkes said he knew the son was named after the father.
The
son. You wouldn’t say it that way if there were two sons.”

“That wasn’t the only thing I missed.”

“You can say that again.”

“What else did I miss?”

“I hate to say this, Hubie, but you missed the fact that Izuanita had the same weird bone structure as her father and brother.”

I sat back and let my hands fall into my lap. “I was blind. I even got upset when you described her as ‘deformed’.”

“Well, maybe ‘deformed’ was a bit harsh.”

“And Chris called her a Modigliani woman.”

“A lot of people think the women in his paintings are hot.”

“Really?” I felt a little better. I told her about Einstein’s quip that the universe and human stupidity are the only two things that are infinite and how I had changed it to be ‘male stupidity’. Naturally, she agreed.

“She had really long limbs,” I muttered nostalgically. “And great skin.”

“Men always go for skin.”

I smiled. “The more the better.”

She took a playful swing at me. “You said she smelled great, too.”

“That’s on the list,” I remembered out loud.

She scanned down the paper. “Burning tropical flowers?”

“That was the smell I remembered being in the air right after I was shot.”

“And?”

“The burning part must have been the gun powder. It made an interesting combination with her perfume.”

“Your nose really is good. Too bad your eyes are going or you might have recognized her as the driver of the van when you were on that ridiculous stakeout.”

“My eyes are perfect. The only reason I couldn’t make her out was I had forgotten to take off my reading glasses.”

“You didn’t take your reading glasses off your perfect eyes. Interesting logic.”

We both started laughing. I pulled out my dollar reading glasses and put them on and stared at Angie, and we laughed even more. Then I took them off and felt around on the table for the chips, accidentally pushing the bowl. It was a sophomoric moment, but we were in that kind of mood.

When we stopped being silly, Susannah asked me about the other things on the list. She loves this stuff.

“What were some of the things you took off the list?” she asked.

“The main one was T. Morgan Fister.”

“He shouldn’t have been there to begin with. You just didn’t like him.”

“Neither did you. But there were good reasons to put him on the list. He told me he was interested in Native American artifacts, and Miss Gladys told me he lived on a street named after a metal.”

“And you figured that metal was titanium.”

“I thought it might be, but when I checked into it, it turned out to be lead.”

“A base metal,” she observed.

“Appropriate,” I said.

“Cassettes?” she said, looking down at the list.

“When we went to the Hurricane, she suggested we have some music. She reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a cassette, and stuck it into the player without even looking at what she was doing.”

“So? The glove compartment is the first place I would have looked for a CD, and the player was right there in the middle of the dashboard.”

“It wasn’t a CD, Suze.”

She hesitated for a moment. “A cassette. Of course. She’s not old enough to be that familiar with cassettes. Wow, you noticed that?”

“Not at the time. It was only after I began to think she might be a Cantú that the cassette thing dawned on me.”

She looked back at the list. “The red stuff in the back seat was her lipstick?”

“Fingernail polish, but the same shade of red.”

“It says ‘Her name’. What does that mean?”

“Tristan told me Cantú was an immigrant. He found that out from the demonstrators. When I later tried out the thesis of Izuanita as a Cantú, I realized someone from Mexico is more likely to give a daughter that name.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Hubie. That sounds like a stretch.”

“By itself, yes. But remember that the theory I put together was made up of a lot of little things that individually didn’t seem significant. But when they all fit together, then you have something.”

She still looked dubious, and I thought of a great example.

“Think about sub-atomic particles,” I started.

“Not that again,” she pleaded.

“Each particle,” I persisted, “doesn’t have a definite path. But when they’re all packed together to make a tennis ball, then there is a definite path. That’s the way all these clues worked together.”

“Lame.”

Maybe it wasn’t such a great an example after all.

“I just thought of something weird,” she said. “Segundo the Segundo tried to frame you for the murder of his father, and his sister tried to frame you for the murder of her brother.”

“And the police bought it both times. Scary.”

“But Fletcher didn’t go through with the arrest the second time, and I know why.”

“O.K., I’ll bite – why?”

“It would have been double jeopardy. You can’t be charged a
segundo
time for a
Segundo’s
death.”

“That’s pretty good. But the real reason he let me go was he bought my theory. That and his desire to make some money on those pots.”