She eased into her mischievous smile. “I guess I was suspicious of Stella all along, too. She ran in to you by accident in that elevator, and you know what she turned out to be, Hubert?”
I thought about it halfheartedly and then said, “I give up. What did she turn out to be?”
“A cruel twit of fate.”
I laughed and it felt good, and the knot went away. Mostly. “Well,” I mused, “maybe someone better will come along for both of us.”
And right on cue, Bob came in and Susannah said, “Bob, I want you to meet my best friend.” I guess being in the papers must have gone to my head, or maybe I just wanted to inject some levity, but I said to him, “Hi, I’m Hubert, but of course you already know that.”
And Susannah started laughing and I started laughing and Bob just stood there with a silly grin on his face.
In The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein, Hubie is solicited to appraise a collection of ancient pots owned by a reclusive collector who insists Hubie be blindfolded on the ride to and from the collection. After being led into the house, Hubie removes the blindfold and starts making the sketches he will need when he tries to place a value on each pot. It’s slow going until he reaches one pot that is especially easy to draw. Indeed, he finds himself drawing some of the designs before he’s seen them!
Then he realized why he was able to do that – it’s one of his own copies.
Susannah’s big brown eyes stared over the rim of her margarita glass, incredulous.
“You let him blindfold you?”
“It was part of the deal,” I said. “Carl said the guy is paranoid about his collection, so he never lets anyone see where he keeps it.”
“But you said it was in plain view in the living room.”
I shrugged. “I guess he never has guests.”
It was a hot dry summer day in Albuquerque, and I needed another margarita. Actually, I needed a glass of cold water to quench my thirst because I knew where quenching it with margaritas would get me – Jimmy Buffet’s favorite town.
Susannah ordered more salsa and chips. The salsa at Dos Hermanas Tortillaria is made by hand on site by one of the hermanas. I don’t know which one because they’re usually in the kitchen in their white frocks with their hands covered in masa and their heads covered with old-fashioned hairnets. The front of the house is run by Angie and the hired help, but the sisters don’t let anyone but family do the cooking.
Susannah gave me that enigmatic smile, like the Mona Lisa but without all the crackly lines. “You could have gone back to steal the pots.”
I gave her one of my own smiles, the one that’s designed to make me look like the sage humoring an untutored waif, but which Susannah says only makes me look like Joseph Biden.
“I’m not a thief, Susannah.” The thief debate is a staple of our cocktail hour at Dos Hermanas, as is Susannah’s rocky love life, her studies at the University and anything else that one of us thinks worth remarking.
“There was that pot you took from the University,” she reminded me.
“Which was subsequently returned along with a sizeable scholarship fund for students.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you took it.”
“Maybe I had a hunch,” I said lamely.
She laughed and took a chug of her margarita that was larger than Miss Manners recommends for young ladies. Susannah takes hers without salt on the rim. Other than that, she has no flaws.
“And there was that pot you stole from Hugo Berdal’s truck.”
“You may recall that Hugo was dead and therefore had no need for the pot, which, incidentally, he had stolen in the first place.”
“Quibbling.”
I sipped my margarita after rotating the glass a few degrees in order to get just the right amount of salt from the rim. It’s a subtle but important skill that I’ve honed over the years. When the last hint of the blue agave had faded away, I took a long draw on my water.
“As it turns out, I do want to go back,” I said.
“Hubie! You are going to steal his pots!”
“Of course not. But I would like to get my twenty-five hundred dollars back.”
“I thought he paid you before you left.”
“He did. After I finished, I went over to the swinging door and knocked on it. Without opening the door, he asked me if I was through. I said I was. He asked me if I’d had my margarita or my beer. I told him I hadn’t, and he said, ‘At least take a drink of one of them while I get the money’.”
“Did you think he was trying to poison you?” she asked excitedly.
“As a matter of fact, the thought did cross my mind. But what reason would he have to kill me?”
“To keep the location of his collection a secret,” she ventured.
“If he was going to kill me, then why bother blindfolding me?”
“So you wouldn’t get suspicious,” she said without hesitation. “If he hadn’t blindfolded you, you would have wondered why he didn’t, and you might have jumped out of the car when it slowed down for one of those turns you didn’t count.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You read too many murder mysteries. Anyway, he obviously didn’t poison me.”
“Maybe it was a slow-acting poison. Or maybe he put it in one of those time-release capsules. I saw that once in a—”
“He didn’t poison me. The beer hadn’t been opened. Even so, I smelled it when I opened it and it smelled right, and you know my sense of smell is infallible.”
“That’s true,” she conceded, ‘but your eyes are failing.”
“They’re not ‘failing’; I just have to use reading glasses sometimes.”
“I wonder why our sense of smell doesn’t fade like our sight as we get old?”
“I have no idea. Anyway, the beer smelled fine. It tasted right, too. In fact, I wanted to sit there and finish the bottle.”
“Even without chips and salsa?”
“Well, there was that,” I conceded. “I also wanted to get away from him. So when he called me back to the swinging door, I walked over. He counted out twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills one at a time, and then he stuck them in my shirt pocket. He told me to walk over to the door and then turn around with the blindfold in my right hand and face the window. I did as he directed, and after I’d been standing there for a minute or two, I heard the front door open. The driver came up behind me and transferred the blindfold from my hand to his hand and then to my head. Then he led me out into the car and drove me home.”
“So you never got a look at him?”
“No. My instructions were to be standing in front of my shop at exactly five o’clock facing the Plaza. I heard a car drive up, and someone got out but left the motor running. He walked up behind me and said, ‘I’m going to blindfold you now’, and he did. You know the rest.”
“Maybe the driver was the guy at the house.”
“Couldn’t be. After the driver closed the door with me standing in the entryway, the guy at the house told me I could take the blindfold off, and he was standing across the room in the swinging door. There wasn’t enough time for the driver to go out through the front door, run around and come back through the back door and be standing there by the swinging door.”
“Maybe he closed the door without going through it and then tiptoed quickly over to the swinging door.” Susannah has a vivid imagination.
“I think I would have heard him. And anyway, what would be the point? Why would he not want me to know he was the driver.”
“So you couldn’t identify him,” she said as if that were obvious.
I stared at her. “But I can identify him; I saw him in the house.”
“Yeah, but you can’t identify him as the driver.”
I shook my head in confusion. “What difference does that make?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to find out what he was up to before we can know that. Maybe being the wheelman makes the crime more serious.”
“Wheel
man?”
“That’s what it’s called, Hubie. If he just takes the money, then it’s theft. But if he takes the money and also drives the getaway car, then maybe it’s something like aggravated theft.”
“It wasn’t a getaway car, Suze; he was just taking me home.”
She shrugged. “So he takes you home, takes off the blindfold while you face Mecca or whatever, tells you not to turn around and drives away, leaving you standing there with twenty-five hundred dollars in your shirt pocket. So why did you say you need to go back to get your money?”
“Because when I reached in to my shirt pocket to move the bills from the pocket to my wallet, they were gone.”
“So that’s it! He didn’t want an appraisal at all. That was just a pretense so he could rob you.”
“If so, he must be the stupidest robber in history. The money he took from me was what he gave me to begin with.”
“Oh, right. Well, it may not be robbery, but he did gyp you. You didn’t get paid for your work.”
“Maybe. He might be so cheap that he couldn’t part with the twenty-five hundred even though his collection is worth somewhere around a million dollars. But it’s also possible the driver just saw the opportunity to make a quick twenty-five hundred, and the collector guy doesn’t know the driver took my money.”
“Unless they’re the same person.”
“We already went through that. They were not the same person.”
“If you’d done that counting the turns thing, you could go back and find out for sure. But it’s too late now.”
“Not really,” I said smugly.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I know the address.”
Hubie’s attempt to recoup his appraisal fee leads to disappearing pots, mistaken identities, two new girlfriends, and a visit to the morgue when Detective Whit Fletcher insists Hubie to try to I.D. a body. When Hubie’s fingerprints are found on the glass with the poison, he understands why the man at the house insisted he have a drink. He also understands why he is upgraded from corpse identifier to prime suspect.
Watch for The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein in Fall 2010
The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Page 24
