The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (22 page)

51

I had planned to follow the evening of solitude with a morning of more of the same, so I was irritated by the philistine pounding on my door at nine the next morning.

Pulling the covers over my head didn’t work. The pounder was persistent, and Geronimo was howling after each knock. Blam, awrwooo, blam, awrwooo. When the knocker heard the howls, he beat louder, scaring Geronimo into whelping less noisily. The two of them created an interesting syncopation, but they lacked melody altogether, so I soon grew tired of the music. I went to the door to see Whit Fletcher. At least Danny Duran wasn’t with him.

Fletcher held in his meaty hand a paper that looked disturbingly like the warrant he’d brought on his previous visit.

I stared down at it. “Duran didn’t get another warrant to arrest me for killing Barry Stiles, did he?”

“Nope. This here is a subpoena duces tecum. You’ve been charged with larceny.” He put on his reading glasses. “This subpoena orders you to appear in court next Thursday and bring all personal and business bank statements for the last two months as well as records of credit card transactions of any and all accounts, both personal and commercial.” He looked up at me. “What the hell you been up to, Hubert?”

I guessed I now had an answer to Alain’s question about whether it was legal for me to reroute the credit card charges to my bank account. But I hadn’t taken any of the money, so I didn’t think I was guilty of larceny. I knew we must have studied larceny in my accounting classes, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was.

“I’ve been running a restaurant. What’s larceny?”

He looked back at the subpoena. “It says here, ‘larceny, by New Mexico statute, is the trespassory taking and asportation of the tangible personal property of another with the intent permanently to deprive him of its possession’.”

“What do ‘trespassory’ and ‘asportation’ mean?”

“My guess is that ‘trespassory’ probably has something to do with trespassing, and ‘asportation’ is probably a fancy way of saying ‘transportation’. Which means in good old English that you trespassed on someone’s property and took something away when you left. Probably that restaurant you just mentioned. Want to tell me about it?”

No, I didn’t. I signed a paper acknowledging receipt of the subpoena and took Geronimo for his morning walk.

52

 “Trespassory taking and asportation of personal property? Is that different from theft?”

The day had passed about as quickly as the accretion of stalagmites. I spent most of it pacing because I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I just wanted five o’clock to arrive so I could discuss my problem with Susannah.

“There must be some technical difference,” I said. “Otherwise, why have two crimes, theft and larceny?”

“It’s the legal system. Why have ‘trespassory’ and ‘asportation’?”

“Good point. You don’t think I could actually be convicted, do you? I didn’t keep any of the money. I gave it all to the restaurant.”

“No, Hubert, you did not give it all to the restaurant. You gave some of it to the employees.”

“But it was their pay for working there.”

“Authorized by whom?”

“Molinero. He asked for a show of hands. After almost everyone voted for the plan, he wished us luck. He approved keeping the place open.”

“But did he approve paying the employees?”

I rubbed my temples. A headache was bearing down on me as I recalled the meeting. “He said there was no money to pay us, and everyone agreed to work without pay.”

“So you took restaurant money that should have gone to Molinero or the investors, and you used it to pay your friends.”

“They are not my friends.” I drank some of my margarita. “Well, some of them are.” I took another sip. “You know what’s really weird? I was reading last night about Escoffier embezzling money and supplies from the Savoy hotel, and I find out the very next day that I’ve been doing the same thing.”

“What did Escoffier do with the stuff he took?”

“Evidently he used some of it to support his mistress in Seaside.”

A mischievous smile crept across her lips. “And you gave some of it to your mistress.”

“Maria is not my mistress. We’ve never so much as kissed.”

“Try telling that to the judge when it comes out you spent the night in her apartment.”

I signaled for Angie.

“Your glass is half full,” said Susannah.

“It feels half empty,” I said, “like me.”

I asked Angie to bring me some aspirin. I know you’re not supposed to take medicine with alcohol, but it sure is easier to wash it down with a margarita than with a glass of water.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

“It’s the restaurant syndrome, Hubie.”

“Restaurant syndrome? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Maybe you know it by its original name, le syndrome de restaurant.”

I groaned. “Please, no more French words and phrases.”

“But that’s it. That’s the syndrome. You start working in a restaurant, and you have to learn all those French terms. It begins to affect your thinking, like the twins thing.”

“The twins thing?”

“Yeah. You know, like how twins have this special language that makes it easy for them to communicate with each other, but it messes them up when they try to deal with normal people.  Restaurant workers are like that. We may start out normal, but after you begin using words like prix fixe, hors-d’œuvres, à la carte, escargots, and raison d'être, you get a little crazy.”

“Raison d'être?”

“I think it’s a raisin soufflé.”

“No. I think the phrase for a raisin soufflé is au courant,” I said.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it affects your judgment, and pretty soon you’re doing crazy things like actually eating snails because you think of them as escargots and don’t realize they’re just slimy snails. And the next thing you know, you’re funneling money from the restaurant to your personal account.”

“I didn’t ‘funnel money’. I was just trying to keep the place in business.”

“I could see the changes come over you, Hubie. I noticed it when you called me up there to waitress. You weren’t yourself. Taking charge, showing leadership, inventing dishes.”

“Thanks a lot.”

She laughed. “Admit it, that is not exactly you.”

“You’re right. But I really invented only one dish, the schnitzel con tres chiles. Rafael invented all three appetizers. Even Miss Gladys contributed with Tafelspitz Sangre de Cristo.”

“I can’t imagine what Alain thought about that one.”

“He said it had a certain Je ne sais quoi.”

“See. There you go again with the French. I hear that all the time, Hubie. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know what.”

“Really? I thought you would know.”

“I do know. It means I don’t know what.”

“If you don’t know what, how can you say you know what it means?”

I raised my glass. “To le syndrome de restaurant.”

53

 “Larceny.”

Layton Kent puffed the word out like a smoke ring, closing his mouth behind it lest it should float back on him. “Unsavory,” he said.

“I’m innocent.”

He peered out over what must surely have been the largest martini glass in the world. The curve of its flared cone rose almost a foot from the thin base.

“All my clients are innocent, Hubert.” He gave me a thin smile. “And when they are not, I make them so.”

The waiter had brought the glass straight from the freezer. The frost evaporated while the gin and vermouth were stirred.

“No olive?” I asked after the waiter departed.

Kent’s stare conveyed his disdain of olives. We were at his table overlooking the eighteenth hole. The golf course was beautiful with its rolling contours and assortment of deciduous trees, few of which were native to New Mexico. Their leaves were gone, of course, it being December. The grass was yellow. The tawny scene was relieved by the green piñon and ponderosa pines. The sun had warmed the air enough that the scenery was despoiled by old gentlemen in stretch-waist pants being pushed to their limits. Both the men and the pants. I recalled that Will Rogers said, “Long ago, when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it's called golf.”

The three ounces of gin and one once of vermouth looked lost in the flower-vase-sized glass. Maybe the idea was to make the portion seem abstemious. He took a sip, placed the glass on the table, and read the papers I’d brought.

“As I have come to expect, you acted incautiously, but not feloniously. The prosecution will no doubt attempt to represent that diversion of the proceeds to the staff was unlawful enrichment, a claim without which they have no case. However, the investors could have harbored no hope of gain had Molinero closed the restaurant as he planned to do. Thus, keeping it open did not damage the investors, and had the possibility of benefitting them.” He looked up at me. “There is, however, one problem. Looking at the numbers you have presented me, five thousand dollars seems to be missing.”

“I took five thousand dollars out of the ten I took to Santa Fe on Friday because I had used five thousand of my own money to pay the staff on Thursday.”

“Why?”

“Because the credit card charges we took in on Wednesday needed to clear, so I made an advance to the restaurant.”

“But there is no indication of a withdrawal of five thousand dollars from either of your bank accounts on any of those days.”

“That’s because I didn’t get it from the bank. I had at my house.”

His eyes widened slightly. “You had five thousand dollars in cash at your house?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In my secret hiding place.”

“Where did the money come from?” He held up a palm before I could answer. “If the money was from an illegal source, do not answer my question.”

“It wasn’t illegal. It was from the sale of an old Laguna pot.”

“Was the buyer given a receipt?”

Oops. “No. I was in Santa Fe. Tristan was tending the shop.”

“Was the buyer known to him?”

“No. Is this going to be a problem?”

He took a sip of his martini, then closed his eyes and seemed to be daydreaming. But I’ve seen that pose before and realize that Layton never daydreams. “You did make an entry into your revenue log of the five thousand as soon as you returned from Santa Fe and learned that your nephew had made the sale.”

“Well, it was sort of hectic going back and forth to—”

“That was not a question, Hubert. It was a statement that you did make an entry into your revenue log of the five thousand as soon as you returned from Santa Fe and learned that your nephew had made the sale.”

“Oh. Right. I did.”

“And you dated it properly.”

“Yes.”

“And you put it in your store safe.”

“Actually, I put it in—”

“Your store safe.”

“Right,” I said.

“Very good. ‘Secret hiding place’ is not a phrase one wants to utter in court. You do understand what duces tecum means, do you not?”

I started to say it sounded like a pair of twos had won a poker hand, but remembered Layton’s sense of humor. Or, more accurately, his lack thereof.

“Make sure you bring all the records,” he directed. “And make sure all the things you have told me today are in them.”

The waiter arrived and asked Layton if the gentleman would be joining him for lunch. I looked at the entrance to see if someone was waiting for permission to come to Layton’s table. Then I realized the gentleman was me. Or I. If I were truly a gentleman, I guess I would have known which pronoun to use.

Layton shook his head, and I left.

54

The hearing on Thursday was brief and my participation even briefer.

It felt like the meeting of some secret society like the Masons or Skull and Bones. I figured it would be in a big courtroom, but we were in a small hearing room instead. A guard of some sort stood by the door and another one next to another door behind a raised desk which I assumed was probably called a bench. They wore sidearms. I couldn’t imagine why. Aside from the two guards, there were only five people in the room, a young lady named Rincon from the District Attorney’s Office, her assistant, Layton, one of his paralegals, and me. None of us looked like violent felons, although Ms. Rincon did wear a rather stern expression which became positively severe when I smiled at her.

The guard next to the bench yelled, “All rise.”

The judge was a wizened little fellow with stringy hair and a face full of broken veins. He eyed the two steps to the bench as if they were the north face ascent to Everest. After perhaps twenty seconds during which he seemed to be debating whether to make the climb, he hiked up his robe with his left hand, placed his right one on the bench for support and slowly mounted the steps.

He took his chair and mumbled for us to be seated. Then he directed Layton and Rincon to approach the bench. They whispered among themselves for ten minutes, but I wouldn’t have understood them even had they been audible because they were speaking legalese.

My nerves had begun to fray that morning when I put on my suit. Nothing good ever happens when you’re wearing a suit. Now I was in a room being guarded by two guys with guns, and an aged drunk was going to decide my fate based on a conversation which, for all I knew, was an example of speaking in tongues.

I was beginning to hyperventilate. The phrase, ‘the wheels of justice’, sprang to mind. I remembered the saying that those wheels grind exceedingly slow. I felt like I was being dragged into that mill to be ground up, like corn being ground into meal between two heavy stones.

Then, out of the miasma of irrational dread, came a flicker of reason. I focused on it until it brightened into the light of understanding. I knew who killed Barry Stiles and I knew why. I figured the killer had an accomplice. I had a hunch who it was but wasn’t certain. I feared others might be in danger.

55

The judge took the matter under advisement. Layton asked that I be allowed to remain out of custody and under my own recognizance. Ms. Rincon made no objection. Maybe smiling at her was not a mistake.