Curse of the Jade Lily (2 page)

“What difference does it make if the artnappers asked for you? You don’t know who they are. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Besides, you don’t need me.”

“Don’t need you, don’t want you.”

“If I don’t act as go-between, the thief, the thieves, they’ll find someone else.”

“For one-point-three mill, you know they will.” Donatucci stood up and started buttoning his coat. “Just go about your business, McKenzie. Tend your turkeys. Forget about the Jade Lily. Forget I was even here.”

I stared out the window, watching the turkeys peck at the food on top of the box.

Batman was a vigilante nut job,
my inner voice said.
That’s not me. It’s not! Still, he was my favorite superhero when I was a kid. Him and Spider-Man, who was a bit of a vigilante, too.
I took a deep breath.
Damn the Lily. Damn the thieves. Damn Mr. Donatucci, that old man. He should have retired years ago.

Donatucci made his way as noisily as possible to the arch between the kitchen and the dining room. I turned toward him just as he knew I would. He was smiling again.

“Do you play chess, Mr. Donatucci?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“Yeah, but apparently not very well.”

“We should play sometime.”

“I think we already have. One hundred twenty-seven thousand.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said ten percent of the ransom. That’s a hundred and twenty-seven thousand.”

“So it is.”

“Plus expenses.”

“In that case, you can buy lunch.”

Dammit.

*   *   *

Besides Mr. Donatucci and myself, there were six men and one woman gathered around a long table in a windowless conference room. Three of the men looked as if they wished they were somewhere else doing something far more important. From the expressions on the faces of the other three, this was as much fun as they’d had in quite a while. The woman, on the other hand, was visibly agitated. She was one of those ultra-chic plus-size gals that gave you the impression she could have been Heidi Klum if only she dropped a hundred pounds.

“This is an emergency meeting of the executive board of trustees,” she said.

“Hey, Perrin. Who are you talking to?” asked one of the happier board members. “We all know why we’re here, Madam President.”

“Ms. Stewart is not the president,” said the man next to him. “She’s the executive director. We don’t have a president, remember?”

“Whose idea was that?”

“It was yours, Mr. Anderson,” Perrin said. She folded her hands on top of a manila folder that lay on the table directly in front of her. She tried to appear calm but didn’t quite manage it.

“Since when did you start listening to me?” Anderson said.

From the spelling of his name, I knew Anderson was Norwegian, which made him part of a dwindling minority. Used to be you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Norwegian around here. Not so much anymore. While Minnesota’s population is still essentially white and Northern European, the number of our Asian, Hispanic, and African residents is increasing steadily. That has annoyed some people, mostly politicians, who have demanded that the cops conduct “immigration stops” to make sure they’re all here legally, Minnesota Nice be damned. On the other hand, the food is better.

“Can we get on with it, please?” asked one of the more serious members.

“For the benefit of Mr. McKenzie,” Perrin said, “I will introduce each member of the board.”

She went around the room. Everyone was a mister, everyone was a prominent something or other. When she reached Anderson, he said, “Geezuz, Stewart,” and made a big production out of looking at his watch. “I need to get back to the office.”

Finally Perrin reached the sixth man.

“Mr. Randolph Fiegen,” she said.

Fiegen was in his late fifties and elegantly dressed. He reminded me of Donald Trump in that he sported the most elaborate and artful comb-over that I had ever seen. Certainly he had that look of contempt on his face that some people get when they’ve been ordering people around for a long time. He didn’t give Perrin a chance to add any accolades.

“I think I speak for all of us when I thank you for agreeing to help us, Mr. McKenzie,” he said.

“I didn’t agree to anything yet.”

“Oh?” Fiegen’s sad, cold eyes regarded me carefully. “I was under the impression that you had. You see, the future of this fine museum may very well hang in the balance.”

“How so?” I asked.

Fiegen spread his hands wide. “For a young institution like ours,” he said, “reputation is everything.”

“How does this work?” I asked. “Who owns the museum?”

“City of Lakes is a nonprofit organization,” Perrin said. “By definition, we do not have private owners, and while we are able to earn a profit, or, more accurately, a surplus, none of the moneys are paid out to shareholders. Instead, such earnings are retained by the museum for our self-preservation.”

“Bullshit,” Anderson said. “We own it. When I say we, I mean the board of trustees, because we’re the ones that’ll be picking up the tab should this place fail. Right now there are forty-seven members on the board. You become a trustee when you contribute half of seven figures or better to the museum, except for the mayor of Minneapolis, two state senators, and a couple members of the state house who are honorary members. The trustees elected the six of us to serve three-year terms on the executive board. I should point out that we all ran unopposed. No one else wanted the job. Madam Executive Director here was hired by the executive board to oversee the day-to-day operation of the museum. She serves at our pleasure. How’s that working out, by the way?”

Perrin didn’t reply, although, from the look she gave Anderson, I thought it fortunate that the formidable conference table lay between them.

“Calm yourself, Derek,” Fiegen said. To me he added, “Derek enjoys comporting himself in an insouciant manner. Clearly it is a facade.”

Anderson smirked. I might have, too, if only I had known what “insouciant” meant.

“Tell me how the Lily was stolen,” I said.

“Is that necessary?” Perrin said.

“It’ll give me an idea of who I am dealing with,” I said.

Anderson rubbed his hands together. “This is my favorite part,” he said.

Perrin scrunched up her face, and for a moment she looked less like Heidi Klum and more like Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz.
She unscrunched and started speaking slowly and carefully, as if she were afraid I might ask her to repeat something. She started by saying that the City of Lakes Art Museum had the most sophisticated electronic security system available; that it had been thoroughly vetted and updated just six months earlier. Anderson had a nice laugh at that, but Perrin continued.

“A forced-entry theft or a smash and grab, I believe that is what it is called, is virtually impossible now,” she said. “The crime was an inside job.”

“They usually are,” I said.

I glanced at Donatucci for confirmation, but he sat quietly, his hands folded on the table in front of him, his half-closed eyes staring at a painting on the conference room wall. I don’t know why. The painting consisted solely of primary colors that looked like they had been splashed on the canvas by a frustrated third grader.

“We have a rear entrance,” Perrin said. “It consists of a series of small rooms. It is impossible to unlock and open the street door leading to the first room without first closing and locking the interior door. You cannot unlock and open the interior door without first securing the next door. And so on. A door that is left open for more than twenty seconds will activate an alarm. Also, digital cameras cover each room. Guards monitoring the cameras can electronically seal all the doors if they see anything amiss.”

“Bandit traps,” I said.

“Just so,” Fiegen said, to prove that he was listening.

“Here,” Perrin said. She opened the folder in front of her and slipped a half-dozen photographs off the top and pushed them before me. The photos had the muddy feel of stills taken from a videotape. They showed a figure dressed in black with a black ski mask hiding his face working a keypad, opening a door, moving through a room, and then heading outside.

“At two o’clock last night,” Perrin said, “or this morning if you prefer, our deputy director in charge of security, a man named Patrick Tarpley, carrying a package under his arm that we now believe contained the Jade Lily, walked through the bandit traps. Cameras show that he opened the doors using codes that he punched into the keypads and strolled—he wasn’t hurrying at all—to an unidentified red SUV that pulled up just as he was leaving the building. He handed the package to someone sitting in the passenger seat of the SUV. The SUV drove off. Tarpley then went into the parking ramp adjacent to the museum, got into his own car, and drove away.”

Two thoughts piled on top of each other. The first—three thieves, the man dressed in black, the driver of the SUV, and the passenger.
Donatucci must have lost a step,
my inner voice said.
He said earlier that he didn’t know if there were more than two thieves.
The second thought I spoke out loud—“How do you know it was Tarpley?”

“He checked in at 4:00
P.M
, but there is no evidence of him checking out,” Donatucci said. “Only two other people knew the security codes, and they were both accounted for. No one has seen him since the theft was committed. Also, he knew the schedule of the guards. He made his move at the exact moment of a shift change. That’s why the guards that were supposed to be watching the monitors didn’t override the codes.”

Why bother with a mask, then?
my inner voice asked.

“Had he ever conducted security drills similar to this?” I asked.

“No,” Perrin said, “but our director of security had.”

“Where is the director of security?”

“On vacation in Africa.”

“Did you contact him?”

“Why?” Anderson said. “What can he do about it?”

“Have you contacted the police?”

“We are hoping that will be unnecessary,” Perrin said.

“The Lily was stolen last night, but you didn’t get a ransom call until eight this morning. You waited six hours without reporting the theft because you expected a call, didn’t you? Why were you expecting a call? Anybody?”

Fiegen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “That was my decision,” he said.

“This has happened before, hasn’t it?”

Neither Fiegen nor anyone else said yes. They didn’t say no, either.

I said, “The cops don’t like it when you neglect to report a major crime. They especially frown on it when you arrange to buy back stolen property.”

“Yet it’s done all the time,” Donatucci said softly, as if he didn’t care whether he was heard or not. “You said so yourself.”

“We prefer to deal with this quietly if at all possible,” Fiegen said.

“Trying to protect your reputation,” I said, repeating what he mentioned earlier.

Fiegen gently tugged at his hair just behind his right ear as if he were fingering an heirloom. “Some of the artwork we exhibit is on loan to the museum, like the Jade Lily,” he said. “In addition, there are the numerous traveling exhibits that we compete for. If word should leak that we are unreliable custodians…”

“City of Lakes doesn’t own the Lily?” I asked.

“No,” Perrin said. “The owner of the Lily lives in Chicago. He was good enough to loan the piece to us. He has not yet been informed of the theft.”

“Who is on the hook for the insurance, you or him?”

“We are. The lending agreement clearly states that the borrower—City of Lakes—is responsible for the loss or damage to the artwork while the art is on our premises, in the amount of the stated value of the art.”

“Who decides what the stated value—”

“We agreed to insure the Lily for the same amount that his insurance company had insured it for,” Fiegen said. “Is this important?”

“How valuable is the Lily? I mean compared to the rest of your exhibits.”

“Top twenty,” Donatucci said.

That made me pause for a few beats.

“How long did Tarpley work for you?” I asked.

“He was hired three months before the museum opened,” Perrin said. “We will celebrate our second anniversary a week from Saturday. May I add, his credentials were impeccable and thoroughly vetted. He had worked at several other museums without as much as a whisper of improper behavior. We also investigated his wife, Von. She was the soul of propriety as well.”

“Do you have a photograph?”

Perrin found two colored glossies in the file in front of her and passed them across the table. The first was a head shot of Tarpley, like the kind used for identification badges. He was an older man, at least fifty, with features that suggested he might have been handsome once. His eyes seemed flat, though, as if all the energy had been drained out of them. It could have been a trick of the photographer, but the picture gave him all the vitality of a paper bag. The woman in the second photograph, however, seemed full of life. She was perhaps twenty years younger and had a quizzical smile on her lips and dancing lights in her brown eyes, as if she considered her good looks to be a lucky accident, like finding a 1943 copper penny in the street.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Forget asking why this seemingly honest man turned thief or why he waited twenty-seven months before making his move. He could have taken many items, yet he didn’t. Instead, he took only one piece, and the piece he took didn’t even rank in the top ten in value. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“If he wished to harm the museum, he couldn’t have done better than taking the Lily,” Perrin said. “It was the cornerstone of our year-two celebration. We are a young museum, as Mr. Fiegen stated. It was hoped that the publicity and attention garnered by the exhibit would help us gain the same respect and prominence currently enjoyed by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center.”

“If Tarpley was looking to hurt the museum, why would he offer to sell the Lily back?” I asked.