The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (28 page)

“Your Bronco is older than I am. See, no matter how good your ear and how dexterous you might be with your fingers, you can’t get a twist tuner to center on a signal. The degree of angle a twist turner moves through is several orders of magnitude below the scale of radio frequencies. A digital tuner measures the frequency and the amplitude of the station’s signal and—”

“I didn’t, but Martin told me what probably happened. As you know, San Roque has little interaction with the outside world. Occasionally a young person leaves and doesn’t return. A few of them are here in the city, but they often don’t fare well. A small band of them are on drugs. Martin thinks they remembered a tribal story about treasure in pots, so they broke mine open hoping to find a treasure.”

“Which they obviously didn’t find, but why take the pieces?”

“I guess they wanted to break them in to smaller pieces to see what they could find. The process was taking too long, so they took the pieces somewhere where they could examine them without worrying about the police showing up.”

“Thanks for including me tonight,” he said after the show was over. “It was radical. And it’s also good to see the bad guy get caught.”

Before he left, I asked him how he was doing, but you already know how that goes.

59

Order was restored to my little corner of the cosmos the next day at five, a margarita in my hand, Susannah across the table.

“I still don’t get how you knew Frederick fired that shot while you were burgling Gerstner’s apartment.”

“I didn’t know at first. I wish I had because I could have avoided being arrested and then being the subject of a manhunt, both of which were pretty unnerving.”

“You know, Hubie, I’d say you demonstrated a lot of nerve breaking in to that building over and over. But I still don’t get how you knew.”

“The shoes were the key.”

“When did you see those shoes on him again?”

“I didn’t. That was a lie I told because the truth was too complicated to explain at the gathering last night. But I saw him in some other exotic footwear, and it made me wonder if he was the one I saw from under the couch.”

“But you said that was a woman. Your even heard her putting the seat down.”

“I thought it was a woman because I’ve never seen shoes like that on a man. Once I had it in my mind it was a woman, then of course I thought the clack was her putting the toilet seat down.”

“Because you were in a man’s apartment, and you pigs always leave the seat up.”

I chose not to argue that point. “But when I started wondering if it was Blass, I realized the same sound is made by putting the seat
up
. Once I started thinking about him, the reasons to think he did it kept piling up.”

“In theory, yes. But if it were one of the guests, that would mean he had anticipated that I would be there and that I would sneak out to Gerstner’s apartment, so he brought a gun along to fire out the window while I was gone.”

“Not very likely.”

“Right. The only person in a position to seize the opportunity of my sneaking out would be the host. First, he wouldn’t have to bring a gun to the party. He already had one there. Second, he could move around more easily than a guest. He could go in to the second bedroom, lock the door, and fire one of the dueling pistols out the window. A guest would have to wander around in an unfamiliar apartment, find the pistol, figure out how to fire it, etc. No, if anyone fired a pistol, it had to be Blass. And remember, after I saw the shoes from under the couch, no one left the building with those shoes on. And the night of the party, the Ma pot was gone from Gerstner’s apartment, so I figured the person with the fancy shoes took the pot and lived in the building.”

“But that’s not conclusive.”

“Conclusive? It’s not even very plausible, but it was the only theory I had. Once I started thinking about how that theory might work, things started falling in line, things that were a lot more plausible and even conclusive.”

“Such as?”

“I knew Gerstner had the pots, and I figured he must have been selling them off to supplement his retirement checks. But Gerstner didn’t seem the type to be able to pull that off. He would have needed someone to be sort of a high-class fence.”

“Enter Frederick Blass?”

“Exactly. And then I remembered Jack Wiezga called Blass a fence, and that started me thinking about Blass’ apartment. You remember how fancy it is?”

“Probably better than you do,” she said while looking down at the floor.

“It was actually two units merged together, I would guess at no small expense. The walls were adorned with paintings by Degas, Gorman, and other expensive original art, and he hosted lavish parties, serving French champagne in hand-blown Jablonski flutes. Department heads make a decent salary, Suze, but he had to be living well above his means.”

“I found the first piece of real evidence in Gerstner’s filing cabinet, bank deposit slips. On the part where you list the checks, there were two with Blass’ name.”

“The checks from Blass may have been for something else. It all sort of piles up like you said, but it’s still not conclusive. And I still don’t understand how you even knew someone tried to frame you in the first place. Maybe that shot we heard was just a car backfiring, and later that night Gerstner came home and someone killed him.”

“I thought that at first, too, remember? But when I saw the murder scene, there was very little blood on the couch. I asked Whit about it, and he said the murderer must have tried to wipe it off. But why would the murderer try to wipe off the blood? I mean, he left the body there, so it was obvious there had been a murder. On top of that, everyone knows some of the blood would remain no matter how much you tried to clean it up. It just didn’t make sense. Then I thought of Ptolemy and Kepler.”

“Oh, brother – not that again.”

“Sorry. It’s how my brain works. Ptolemy and Kepler gave two explanations for the same thing. I realized there were two explanations for the blood being swirled around on the couch. One was what Whit told me – someone tried to wipe it off. The second explanation is that someone tried to wipe it
on
. Once I thought of that, I realized it made more sense. The murderer must have shot Gerstner somewhere else and brought the body to Gerstner’s apartment. Then he tried to make it look like the shooting had taken place there by smearing Gerstner’s blood on the couch. Now, there’s no reason to risk moving the body and wiping blood on the couch unless you’re trying to frame someone. So the blood on the couch was the final piece of the puzzle from my perspective. Once I realized the murderer was trying for a frame, everything came together.”

“But why frame you?”

“Well, that part was just bad luck. Blass knew who I was and he knew the story about Gerstner expelling me. Blass also has a facile mind. When he saw me leave the party, it must have occurred to him that he might be able to frame me, so he fired a shot outside the window just in case. If he didn’t go ahead and kill Gerstner later, what had he lost? A little gunpowder, maybe a small ball of lead. Obviously, he was already thinking about killing Gerstner, and this gave him a way to make it safer to do so. I also talked to Whit about that shot. Guess what he told me?”

I nodded. “Now here’s where Blass got really lucky. Of course he couldn’t have known where I was going when I stepped outside. Maybe he thought I went out for a smoke. That’s what I told Horace Arthur when I came back in, and that’s also what I told Whit Fletcher. But it didn’t matter for Blass’ purpose. People saw me leave, so they would know I wasn’t there. All that mattered was that I was somewhere else. But the somewhere else happened to be Gerstner’s apartment, which is naturally where Blass dumped the body.”

You could almost see the little light bulb hovering over Susannah’s head. “Because when they found the body, it had to be somewhere you could have gone during the short time you were away from the party.”

“Exactly. If Blass had dumped the body up in Tijeras canyon, my being at the party would have given me an alibi instead of incriminating me.”

“So he had to put Gerstner’s body in the building, and the best place was Gerstner’s own apartment. And the lucky part for Blass is that was exactly where you’d been.”

“And the lucky part for me was that no one saw me break in. If they had, I think the police would have been so certain it was me, they wouldn’t have released me, and I never could have found out who really did it.”

“Do you think anyone heard the second shot, Hubie? The one that actually killed Gerstner? Or did Blass challenge Gerstner to a duel somewhere out in the desert?”

We both laughed at that and took another drink.

“I’m sure the shot we heard was from one of the dueling pistols, but the murder weapon was not one of those pistols. You know I don’t know anything about guns, but I imagine a dueling pistol wouldn’t be a murderer’s choice of weapon. They only fire one shot and even that’s not very reliable. No, he used a modern dependable weapon, a Kel-Tec .380 to be exact.”

“How do you know that?”

“Whit told me. They found it in his car. And typical of Blass, it was the chrome-plated model. The ballistic test matched perfectly with the slug they took out of Gerstner’s head.”

“Yes. On my last trip to Rio Grande Lofts, I broke in to Blass’ loft and got one of the dueling pistols. Then I went upstairs and broke in to Gerstner’s loft. I rubbed some damp toilet paper against the couch then against the muzzle of the gun. Then I took the gun and put it back. For good measure, I hid that copy of a Ma pot I made in Blass’ second bedroom closet.”

“You framed him!”

“I did. He framed me, then I framed him. The big difference, of course, is that he actually did it.” Then I thought about it. “Maybe I didn’t frame him. Can you frame someone who’s already guilty?”

“I still can’t believe he
is
guilty. I know you proved it, and now I know they even found the gun he used. But why did he do it, Hubie?”

“Well, this is just guesswork. The Ma were missing eighteen pots. If we assume Gerstner started out with all eighteen, then fifteen had already been sold since I recovered only three. I told you there were only two deposit slips with Blass’ name on them. So the way I see it, Blass sold fifteen pots but had only paid Gerstner for two of them so far. So Blass owed Gerstner for thirteen pots. I know several collectors who would pay fifty thousand each for those pots. Thirteen pots times fifty thou is $650,000. People have killed for a lot less.”

She shook her head in dismay. “He doesn’t seem like such a bad person.”

“I agree. I told you how much I liked him after the party. I think he just got in so far over his head that he couldn’t see any other way out. Maybe Gerstner grew tired of waiting and threatened to go to the police if Blass didn’t pay up.”

“But wouldn’t Blass have gotten some of the money for being the fence?”

“Of course. Who knows what their arrangement was. Blass’ share could have been ten percent. Or say it was even a fifty-fifty deal. That’s still $325,000 he owed Gerstner, and it could have been a lot more. Knowing how he lived, he may already have spent it.”

“So the Rusyn connection had nothing to do with it?”

“No, that turned out to be a dead end. But it did explain why Gerstner had that piece of paper with the first three letters of my name on it.”

“The letters on Gerstner’s piece of paper were Cyrillic. What looks like an ‘H’ is actually an ‘N’. Or at least that’s the sound it makes. The ‘U’ thing makes that ‘Ts’ sound.”