The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (2 page)

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. Carl said the guy is paranoid about his collection. He never lets anyone see it.”

“But you said it was in plain view in the living room.”

I shrugged and looked around for our server, Angie. “I guess he never has guests.”

Business is slow in the high-end pot trade, and Susannah’s chores as a part-time server at
La Placita
don’t allow much time for socializing, so she and I meet most weekdays at five for margaritas at
Dos Hermanas Tortillaria
where we can get anything that’s on our minds off. The topics run the gamut but frequently deal with her attempts to find Mr. Right and my brushes with the law. She’s a couple of inches taller than me and a couple of decades younger, outdoorsy but still very feminine.

It was a typical dry summer day, 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.

So when the willowy Angie made her way through the crowd and over to our usual table, I asked for a large glass of ice water.

And another margarita. The water was a complement, not a substitute.

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.

The salsa is simple – tomatoes, jalapeños, white onions, and cilantro, finely chopped and seasoned with just a touch of salt and their secret ingredient, lime zest. I make the same recipe at home but it’s never as good, probably because the sisters have a source for real tomatoes whereas I have to use the hydroponic, picked-green and ripened-in-the-truck jobs they sell in grocery stores.

Susannah has a theory that the chips soak up alcohol and keep her from getting drunk.

She grabbed the last chip from the bowl before Angie whisked it away and said, “You know what you should have done, Hubie? You should have counted how long you went before each turn and which direction the turns were. Then you could have re-traced the route and found out where he lives.”

“You must have seen that in an old movie.”

“You saw it, too? Humphrey Bogart, right?”

“I don’t remember who was in it. Anyway, I was busy doing something else.”

“What?”

“I was trying to remember if I’d ever been blindfolded before,” I said sheepishly.

“How long could that take? I don’t remember you ever telling me about being kidnapped, so…Wait! I’ll bet you played pin the tail on the donkey at birthday parties, and that’s when you were blindfolded.”

“Close. It was at birthday parties, but it wasn’t pin the tail on the donkey. It was when I got to swing at the
piñata
.”

“Bet you were never the one who busted it open.”

“How did you know that?”

“You probably couldn’t reach it,” she said mischievously.

“I wasn’t that short then.” I’m 5' 6" now and used to the occasional short joke.

“No one’s tall in the first grade, Hubie, but I’ll bet you were the shortest one.”

“Was not,” I said in my little boy voice. “Pudgy Perez was even shorter than me. Wider too.”

“I think I could have guessed that. What happened to him?”

“He never got much taller, but he got a lot wider. He’s a mechanic. I take my Bronco to him when it needs repairs.”

“He must be a genius to keep that thing running. But why did you never hit the
piñata
?”

“My mother said it would be rude for the guest of honor to be the one who broke the
piñata
, so my father would pull the rope when I swung. Then after everyone had a turn or two, he would let one of the other kids clobber the thing without making it look too obvious. He was pretty deft with a
piñata
rope.”

I guess my eyes may have clouded over a bit with nostalgia. I stared off into the middle distance.

After a few seconds, Susannah said, “Something bothering you, Hubie?”

I shrugged. “When I was older, maybe fifteen, Consuela told me the tradition is to let the birthday person break the
piñata
. I was kind of upset.”

“You were angry with your parents for not letting you break the
piñata
?”

“Of course not. I was embarrassed that all my friends probably thought my family were dolts because we didn’t know the rules about
piñatas
on birthdays.”

“That’s your worst childhood experience?”

“Hey, it’s hard enough fitting in when you’re short and don’t play sports, but throw in feeling foolish, and—”

“Get over it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Anyway, I still had a lot of fun. I remember once when I was about eleven, the
piñata
had mints in it, and when it broke open they showered down on the grass. Lupita Fuentes and I jumped at the same mint, but she grabbed it first and popped it in her mouth. Then she stuck her tongue out with the mint on it.”

“Geez,” Susannah moaned, “I think I know where this is going.”

“Yep. ‘You want to taste it?’ she said. That was my first kiss.”

“Wow,” she said sarcastically, “Your first kiss and a French one at that!”

“I wonder what ever happened to Lupita?”

“Probably married Pudgy Perez. Can we get back to your blindfolded ride? I don’t see how thinking about blindfolds could prevent you from memorizing the route.”

“I’m not very good at multitasking. And anyway, I didn’t think there was any reason I’d need to go back, so why memorize the route?”

She 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 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 (currently in art history, but subject to change without notice), old movies, and anything else one of us deems worthy.

“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.”

“I had a hunch,” I said lamely.

She laughed and took a chug of her margarita larger than Miss Manners recommends for young ladies. Susannah takes hers without salt on the rim. Other than that, she has no flaws.

“Anyway,” I added, “you helped me take the thing.”

“True,” she agreed, “but it’s not stealing when an art historian does it.”

“I know. You call it ‘deaccessioning’.”

“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.”

“There was something else we took from that truck,” I reminded her, “the inflatable woman.”

“Yuk, don’t remind me.”

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.”

“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’. I heard his footsteps recede, and to tell you the truth, I was beginning to think he wouldn’t pay me unless I drank something.”

“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 cracked the door slightly and counted out twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills one at a time as he transferred them from his left hand to his right. He stuck the money in my shirt pocket and told me to walk over to the door and face the window with the blindfold in my hand. After I’d been standing there for a minute or two, I heard the 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. That’s why I missed our cocktail hour yesterday. I was told not to look back, just to keep facing the Plaza. I heard a car drive up. Someone got out but left the motor running. He walked up behind me and said, ‘I’m going to blindfold you now’. 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 inside 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 through a back door and be standing there by the swinging door.”