The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (10 page)

“Especially that part. Someone who would see the humor in that might be just the sort of guy I’m looking for. Someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously, someone who’s just as worried about going online as I am.”

I started getting nervous. “I don’t know, Susannah. I wasn’t being serious. I don’t know anything about this whole arena, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you meeting up with—”

“Come on, Hubert. I’m a big girl. It won’t be your responsibility.” She waved for Angie. “All of a sudden my enthusiasm for this idea is back, thanks to you.”

My enthusiasm for the idea had decidedly lessened from where it started, which was zero on the enthusometer. And I somehow didn’t believe I wouldn’t feel responsible if a fiasco resulted from the ad she was determined to place.

It was almost time for Susannah’s class, so she scooped the flowers out of the glass, gave me a peck on the cheek, and said, “Good luck tonight.”

I was tempted to order another margarita, but I was driving, so I settled for the check instead.

18

Covering the inside of the Bronco’s windows with newspaper and masking tape was my first plan – cheap and effective. But also likely to raise suspicion, and you know me – I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks no matter how small. So I’d spent most of the afternoon looking for fabric.

I gave no thought in my youth as to where to buy fabric, but I remembered it was available at Sears, so I went there and discovered they no longer sell it. A minor disappointment compared to the discovery they no longer sell candy. I tried the other department stores in the mall with the same luck. No fabric, no candy. I rarely eat sweets, but the childhood memory of the maple nuts at Sears had me looking for some.

There was a kiosk selling candy. Actually, the kiosk was just sitting there; a young lady inside it was selling the candy. She told me they didn’t have maple nuts, and she also told me I could buy fabric at Wal-Mart.

She was right. They had the fabric, the greeter was an elderly gentleman who seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and they even had maple nuts, so I bought a package of those as well.

I pinned the fabric to the cloth headliner in the Bronco, gathering it as I went so it looked from the outside like curtains. Curtained car windows are not uncommon in New Mexico, so I hoped they would attract little notice. I attached the fabric with pins because I planned to take it down as soon as possible.

I parked the Bronco on the corner of 4
^th
and Silver, climbed between the captain’s chairs, over the folded-down back seat, and into the back. I shortened the adjustable legs on the tripod, attached my refractor scope, and poked the front end between two panels of the curtains. To prevent passers-by from seeing inside, I safety-pinned the panels above and below where the scope protruded. Then I aimed the scope and adjusted the eyepiece until the image of the keypad filled the entire field on the glass.

After twenty minutes, a car pulled up to the entrance of the parking garage of Rio Grande Lofts, and I watched through the scope as the driver keyed in #2330. The gate slid open, the driver drove through, and the gate closed. A second driver arrived not too long after the first. She was driving a large white SUV. The window rolled down and a red-nailed finger keyed in #9999. Once again, the gate opened, she passed through, and the gate closed.

I removed the scope from the tripod, placed it in its case, and drove home.

The scope and tripod went inside with me. Breaking in to my house would be difficult, but breaking in to the Bronco would be easy even for someone like me who isn’t a burglar, so I never leave anything valuable in it.

I opened the package of maple nuts and a very cold bottle of New Mexico champagne. Yes, there is a New Mexico champagne, although it is made by a French family called Gruet. Their
Blanc de Noir
is astonishingly good. I often enjoy a few small flutes in the evening and almost as often with breakfast.

The maple nuts and champagne made a delicious if somewhat unorthodox midnight snack, and I enjoyed it as I reflected on what I thought I had learned.

First, although I had seen only two examples, I thought it a plausible assumption that all the codes to open the entrance gate at Rio Grande Lofts were four numbers preceded by a pound sign. Second, people are not very careful when selecting codes. 9999 is easy to remember, but someone trying to gain unauthorized access would probably try all the easy codes first – 1234, 1111, 9999, etc. I might be able to get in just by punching in easy-to-remember number combinations, but since I already had two codes I knew would work, I didn’t plan to stand at the keypad punching and hoping.

I wanted in fast, I wanted in covertly, and I wanted out safely.

19

My first foray was for reconnaissance.

I read until one-thirty in the morning. Then I put a light windbreaker over my shirt and walked downtown. Being the only person afoot at that hour was a little scary. But there was still a trickle of traffic on Central, so I figured I could run onto the street and stop a passing car if a mugger approached.

I reached the garage entrance shortly after two a.m., stepped up to the keypad, and punched in #2330. The gate slid open and I walked down to the parking garage of Rio Grande Lofts. It seemed almost too simple.

I ambled around the garage for a few minutes to get the lay of the concrete. There was a lot of it. Floors, pillars, walls, even the ceiling was concrete. I thought it would look better with a coat of plaster, but I guess aesthetics is not a major consideration in parking garages.

A well-lit glassed-in area illuminated the otherwise dark garage. Two elevators and a door were visible through the glass. The door to the area was locked, and another keypad was next to the knob. I stared at it for a moment and asked myself the obvious question: Why was there another keypad? Surely the same code that opened the gate wouldn’t open the door. What would be the point?

But I tried it anyway. Sure enough, #2330 didn’t open the door. Maybe an apartment number would do it. I tried the only apartment number I knew, 1101. Nothing happened. I tried #1101. Nothing happened.

Then I walked around the garage some more. I’m in the building, I told myself, so surely I can get past the garage. I thought back to the night I watched the keypad through my telescope, and I remembered the second entrance code I’d seen was #9999. I also remembered how people pick easy numbers. So I revisited the keypad by the door to the glassed-in area and punched in 9999. Nothing. Then I punched in #9999 and 9999#. Same result. Then I tried 1234, #1234, 1111, #1111, 2468, #2468, and 6666 just for the devil of it. Then I gave up.

You’re probably smarter than I am, so you may have already realized I was going to have a problem leaving the building. If so, I can only ask where you were when I needed you?

I walked to the exit of the garage and waited for the gate to open. But of course it didn’t. I tried to slide it open. I might as well have tried to slide one of the concrete columns to a different location. The sensing device was a squat pedestal covered with sheet metal, and I could see no way of removing the cover. And what would I have done had I been able to get the cover off? Cross the wires in a clever way to make the gate open? Remember this is Hubert Schuze, technophobe extraordinaire.

So I did nothing. Nothing to get out, that is. Instead, I tried the doors to all the cars. Several of them were unlocked. I guess if you park in a secure garage, you may not bother locking your car. I selected an old Mercury Grand Marquis, climbed in to the back seat, and eventually fell asleep.

The sound of a car starting woke me up at 6:40. I was cold, unshaven, hungry, and needed to pee. The latter was the only one I could deal with. I drenched the right front tire of a Mercedes 700. Maybe the owner would think a dog did it.

I paced around the garage trying to warm up, running my hands through my hair, trying to stroke the creases out of my clothes, and waiting for the right moment. The third person out of the elevator and through the glass door was a woman in her twenties looking poorly made up and well hung over. I patted my pockets as if I had forgotten my keys. When she pushed the door open, I grabbed it and walked in. She never looked back.

Elevator or stairs? I had the notion the elevators might stop automatically on the first floor. If the doorman saw me when the elevator opened, I’d be sunk. So I took the stairs all the way to the eleventh floor, my stomach churning from hunger and fear. My footfalls on the concrete steps sounded like gunshots and reverberated through the hard-surfaced stairwell. I expected someone to burst through a door at any moment and demand to know who I was and what I was doing in the building. The combination of anxiety and climbing eleven stories had me panting like a dog by the time I reached the door to the eleventh floor, but at least I made it.

For all the good it did me. The door was locked. I may have uttered a profane epithet. Then I stood there trying to figure out why the door was locked. I guessed the door could be opened only from the hallway. That way, no one fleeing the building during a fire could accidentally enter back in if she had started out on the seventh floor, for example, miscounted in her panic, and tried to exit at the second floor thinking she had reached the safety of the ground floor.

I descended the stairs trying each doorknob in turn. They resisted my twist until I reached the first floor. I eased the door open and peered in to the lobby. A doorman was holding the front door for someone leaving the building. When he turned around, his field of vision would include the door I was holding open, so I closed it and waited.

I opened the door a few seconds later and saw the doorman’s back. He was sitting on a stool staring outside. The elevator opened, and the doorman responded by turning around. I closed the door before he could see me. Then I asked myself what the devil I was doing. I answered that I had no idea.

I was cold and hungry. I wanted to go home. I suppose I could have simply walked out. The doorman might have been surprised to see a stranger depart the building, but that had to happen from time to time, didn’t it? A resident could drive in to the garage with a visitor from out of town and take that person up to his apartment for the night. The next morning, the resident might go off to work and his visitor might decide to go down the block to buy a magazine. He would need to take along at least $2.95 plus sales tax.

I could walk out the front door. It might be standard procedure for the doormen to ask all visitors whose guest they were, especially if the guests expected to regain entrance after buying their magazines. What if I were asked? I could say I had enjoyed a night of unbridled passion with one of the residents who preferred to remain anonymous.

I heard footsteps in the stairway above me. One of the residents was skipping the elevator in order to get some exercise. Or maybe the elevator was too slow during the morning rush and the person was in a hurry. Of course it didn’t really matter
why
the person was coming down the stairs. What mattered was that in a few seconds, I would be spotted.

So I descended to the basement. And of course the footsteps followed. I wasn’t thinking fast enough. Americans don’t walk to work anymore. The person coming down the stairs would be headed for his car. So when I got to the basement, I left the glassed-in area and walked between a row of parked cars. Then I bent down to tie a shoe that was not untied and saw a man come out of the stairs and walk down a different row of cars. A few moments later, I heard a car start.

Then another person emerged from the glassed-in area. I was caught in the morning rush in the basement of Rio Grande Lofts. I decided to put aside temporarily the problem of how to exit the building. I had come to reconnoiter, and I felt duty-bound to do it. So I walked back to the glassed-in area, waited for the next resident to open the door, did my patting-my- pockets-for-my-keys routine, and walked in the door before it closed. The man who had passed through the door turned to give me a suspicious look, but then decided to let it go. Maybe he was running late for work.

I strode boldly to the elevator and punched the up button, but my resolve wavered as I recalled a camera in the Albuquerque Hyatt that had made me a murder suspect by placing me on a floor I had no reason to visit. A ding sounded. The little up arrow illuminated. The elevator door slid open. I craned my neck to see if I could spot a camera without it spotting me, realized that was stupid, and sidled in just as the door slid shut.

No camera. I suppose they were so confident in their perimeter security, they didn’t worry about an intruder getting as far as the elevator. I exhaled, expecting a smooth ascent to eleven. The ride was quicker than I anticipated.

That was because it stopped at four. The doors opened to reveal a woman with impressively quaffed blond hair. She wore tan slacks, a white blouse, and high heels she didn’t need. She was taller than me in her bare feet.

“Going down?”

“Up,” I replied and reached for the ‘close door’ button.

“I’ll ride along,” she said and stepped in before I could get the door closed. “Better to grab the elevator while you can this time of morning,” she added cheerily by way of explanation.