The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (7 page)

My nephew Tristan lives in a student ghetto on Gold, just a few blocks from the University where he studies – of all things – computer science. It’s hard to imagine we came from the same gene pool.

He doesn’t look like me either. I’m short and compact with straight brown hair trimmed short and combed close to the scalp. He’s tall and slightly pudgy with black hair that hangs down in loose ringlets. He also has olive skin and what the girls think of as bedroom eyes. He’s a genuine person, and girls like that even better.

He’s not really my nephew. He’s the grandson of my Aunt Beatrice, but I call him my nephew and he calls me Uncle Hubert. He supports himself with periodic gifts from his Uncle Hubert and by doing odd jobs having to do with computers. One particular task he is often paid for is called de-bugging. It doesn’t involve insects, but that’s all I know about it.

Given that I’m on the wrong side of forty-five and live alone in the back of my shop, Tristan is about as close to a son as I’m ever likely to have. I enjoy his company. I also turn to him for help when technology intrudes itself into my life, and it was for both those reasons that I dropped by his apartment. I waited until I thought he was awake – noon – and came with a gift of tacos filled with the last of Emilio’s
barbacoa
. No jalapeños in this case. Tristan doesn’t share my taste for
comida
pecosa
.

I also had my laptop with me because he had told me to bring it when I had called about the current matter. You may be surprised that I have a laptop.

So am I. Tristan gave it to me because I had some security issues in the store and he hooked up a camera that takes a picture when anyone enters and sends the picture to the laptop where it is displayed by some black magic on the screen along with the time of day when the person entered. All of which is triggered by a laser beam across the door. Theoretically, I could use the laptop for all sorts of other techie stuff like swamping the internet, playing games and sending email, but I’m not interested in those things.

Tristan was eating the tacos and drinking something called a Jolt Cola which he said used to advertise itself as having “all the sugar and twice the caffeine.” He would probably have preferred a beer but he told me he had class that afternoon.

“You never take morning classes,” I noted.

“Interferes with my circadian rhythm,” he said.

“And all that caffeine doesn’t?”

“Nah, it just gets me going.”

“When I was a student here,” I began and could already see his eyes rolling back in their sockets, “most of the required courses were in the morning.”

He smiled at me. “I think you may have mentioned that before. But now everything you need is offered in the afternoons.”

“I guess the faculty finally gave in to the sleeping habits of students,” I lamented.

“Actually,” he corrected, “it’s the faculty who drive the schedule. They refuse to teach early classes.”

I was preparing a biting remark about the faculty when I remembered that I often eat breakfast at ten in the morning with my shop closed and dark.

He finished the tacos and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, saw me see him, and said, “I’m doing laundry today.”

“I suppose you need some quarters?”

He allowed as how he did, and I gave him four hundred of them in the form of a single bill with Benjamin Franklin on it. I noticed that Ben’s picture is now off to one side, the bill has weird pastel colors added to the traditional green, and a metallic strip runs through it. The Federal Government – they made my profession illegal, tax me when I continue to do it, and now they have nothing better to do than tinker with our money.

Tristan handed me the device I had come for. It looked like a middle-school science project, a perforated metal plate about six inches square with wires and little devices all stuck together. One wire dangled down the side and had a sort of plug looking thing, but not the sort that would go in a wall outlet.

“You made this?”

“Yep. Sorry it looks so messy, but you just need it for one use. I’m not going to market them.”

“Could you?”

“Not and stay out of jail. Let me show you how to use it. You plug this into one of the USBs on your laptop,” he said, indicating the wire hanging from the device. Then he handed me a small plastic device the shape and size of a piece of gum. “You put this in a different USB.” He showed me the USB slots in the back of the laptop. “Then you just aim this at the garage door and push this button. You’ll have to hold it down for a while depending on how long it takes to find the code. When you see the garage door start to open, you can let go of the button, but not before. Otherwise, you’d have to start over.”

“I won’t need electricity to make this thing work?”

“The battery in the laptop will supply the current. Make sure it’s charged up.”

“So I’m using the computer just as a battery?”

“No, the jump drive has a micro in it that will direct the device to run through all the possible codes in sequence.”

I asked him what a jump drive was and he pointed to the gum-sized piece of plastic.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

“Given when
Casitas del Bosque
was built, they probably have second generation openers. Those are coded by setting dip switches in the transmitter and the receiver to a matching combination. Depending on the number of switches, there can be up to 256 codes.”

“So the most switches they have is eight.”

“Uncle Hubert! How did you know that?”

“I don’t know what a dip switch is, but I recognize 256 as the eighth power of two, so if the switches have two positions, off and on, and there are eight of them, then the number of combinations is two raised to the eighth power, and that’s 256.”

He was staring at me in admiration. It felt good but was fleeting.

“Anyway,” he continued, “It can run through a signal every second, so the worst case would be about four and a half minutes.”

I should have left it there, but I had to ask. “Why are they called second generation?”

He laughed. Not at me, but because he thought the history of garage door openers had a funny chapter. “The first garage door openers just sent an unencoded signal. That was fine when they were a novelty. But the FCC limits their frequency to between 300-400 megahertz, so after a lot of them were installed, it would sometimes happen that two people in the same neighborhood would buy units that turned out to be sending on the same frequency, and when you pressed your opener, your door went up but so did the guy’s down the block.”

“What’s megahertz, a super car rental company?”

He likes it when I make jokes about technical terms.

After a polite laugh, he said, “So they put codes in them that you set with dip switches like I said. But anyone with a few diodes and resisters and a soldering iron can make a device like this, so after a few burglaries, they came up with the third generation openers that have more complicated coding.” His eyes lit up. “And now there’s a new model that works by reading your fingerprint. You just put the tip of your finger over the opener and up goes the door. I’d love to have one of those. Of course, I’d need to get a garage first.”

Then he looked at me and said, “Do I want to know why you need this?”

“I’m not going to commit a burglary,” I pledged. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

I drove from Tristan’s apartment directly to 183 Titanium Trail.

Where, contrary to my nature, I walked boldly up to the front door and rang the bell. Or at least pushed the button. I didn’t hear a bell. I put my ear to the door and my finger to the button and still heard nothing. I looked at the door and wished it was one of those with a little window. I could look inside, see the pot collection on the left wall, and know that Segundo Cantú was the guy I needed to see concerning my twenty-five hundred dollars.

Maybe I’d also hit him up for another hundred and thirty thousand, which is what I calculated he would have cleared if he sold my copies as part of the collection.

I got back in the Bronco and drove around back. I plugged in the jump drive. It didn’t jump, but then tech terms make no sense. I attached Tristan’s widget to the computer and pushed the button. In about a minute, the door shuddered slightly and then moved. Dust flew up from where the door had rested against the floor.

I walked into the garage and put my hand on the hood of the Cadillac to see if the engine was warm. I don’t know why I did that, exactly. I’d seen it in an old movie, and it just seemed like something I should do.

The hood was cold to the touch.

The door from the garage into the house was locked.

I said a bad word.

Then I remembered something I read in one of Susannah’s murder mysteries, one where the hero was a burglar of all things, an expert at picking locks using a collection of little odd-shaped pieces of steel. The process requires placing several of those in the keyhole and then manipulating them until you get each one of the tumblers to move. I guess what you really do is make the little picks line up in such a way that they mimic the bumps on a key.

I didn’t plan on trying that – way too complicated for me.

But the burglar also mentioned something called ‘loiding a lock’, which is called that because you use a thin strip of celluloid. You just stick the celluloid into the door frame and it slides around the bolt, forcing it out of the bolthole. Loiding won’t work on a deadbolt. You have to pick those. But it will work on the simple locks where the bolt is held in the hole by just a spring. And where the door doesn’t fit in the frame too tightly because you need to have room to force the celluloid around the bolt. I pulled on the knob and the door moved at least a quarter of an inch. There was ample space between the door and the jamb. I thought I could break in.

O.K., I know I told Tristan I wasn’t going to commit a burglary, and I wasn’t. It’s not a burglary if you don’t take anything.

Loiding doesn’t require skill, but it does require celluloid. Or you can use a credit card. I had neither with me. My drivers license would probably work, but I didn’t want to risk damaging it. “No, officer, I didn’t try to alter my license. It just looks that way because I used it to break into a house.”

I went back to the Bronco and found the service card that came with it, a little piece of plastic just like a credit card that I used when the Bronco was in warranty. I thought about how long ago that was, wondered where the years had gone, put that thought aside, and realized I had no use for the warranty card.

Other than loiding the door which it did perfectly. But not until I had closed the garage door because loiding locks is an activity best done out of anyone’s sight.

The door led into a kitchen. There was a swinging door against the back wall just where it should have been. I pushed it open. The window with the shade was where I remembered it. The beige carpet was still on the floor but dirtier than I remembered it. It was the same room.

But the coffee table was gone. And the Danish modern couch was gone.

I turned around to look at the fireplace. It was still there. Those things are the devil to pack up and move.

The shelves were there, too. They were still running from floor to ceiling, nice deep shelves just perfect for displaying a collection of old and valuable Anasazi pots. A collection, say, like the one that had three of my copies in it.

Except the copies were not there. Which didn’t surprise me, because neither were any of the other pots.