The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (22 page)

Mamdouba pressed the elevator button and we waited for the slow machine to grind its way up to four. We took it down to the first floor and again entered the North American mammal hall. He stopped at a guard desk and used a telephone to call someone to take us the rest of the way.

"What's going on with the animals? Somebody sick?" Mike asked, referring to the crew of gowned and masked scientists still at work inside several of the dioramas.

"Aren't these wonderful? It was one of our original explorers, Carl Akeley, who designed the first diorama here. Before his time, people stuffed animal skins with straw. It was not only bad aesthetically, because of all the lumps, but there was frequently insect infestation. Akeley was a great sportsman and hunter. He knew the animals intimately."

Mike was more interested in the taxidermy technique than I was. He listened closely as Mamdouba described the famous Akeley innovation. "The first thing Carl did was pose the actual animal's skeleton. The real one, after the body was cleaned. Then he used clay to sculpt the creature's muscles and tendons, on top of its very own bones. Completely true to life. Finally, he'd take the original skin and place it over the reconstructed animal. That's why they look so lifelike."

More than I needed to know about the lost art of taxidermy.

"So the little men and women in white, what are they up to today? Plastic surgery for the old animals? BOTOX?" Mike and I watched as they dabbed with Q- tips at ears and hooves and antlers.

"Precisely, Mr. Chapman. Just the occasional touch- up. Keep their teeth white and their coats shiny. The surgical masks do look a bit serious, don't they? We make our workers take that precaution when they're in the cabinets. You see, one of the surefire ways to kill the bugs when you're preserving the natural skins is to make certain there's enough arsenic in the treatment."

Mamdouba looked serious. "It's a staple in our conservation department, Detective, and we wouldn't want any of the workers to breathe it in. Could be deadly."

19

"Forgot your pass, Mr. Mamdouba?" A bespectacled young man, about thirty, dressed in a denim work shirt and jeans, came up behind the curatorial director and tapped him on the back.

"Ah, Zimm. Perfect man for the job. Meet Alexandra Cooper here. And Mr. Chapman." "Mark Zimmerly. Entomology."

"Bugs?" Mike asked as they exchanged handshakes.

"Yeah, well, spiders in particular. Gnaphosoidae. Australian ground spiders. Six hundred and fifty species and still counting."

"No offense, but I was hoping for something with fewer legs and no stingers."

Zimm turned and led us back to a tall doorway behind the bank of elevators. There was a laminated photo ID around his neck, and he bent over to scan it in against the security pad.

Mamdouba followed Zimm, taking us down a poorly lighted staircase that wound around for three flights. The dull gray paint was chipped and faded, and there were smudged handprints on the wall where people before us had tried to balance their footing on the narrow treads.

Chapman whispered in my ear as I turned a corner, "Remind me to tell Mercer and Vickee never to let the kid go to a museum. Friggin' arsenic everywhere. Did you have any idea?"

"Takes us back to square one. Whoever poisoned Katrina Grooten knew the field of suspects would be wide open. He didn't have to go into a pharmacy and ask for a prescription. Just point the finger at someone else who worked in any of the institutions." At the bottom of the steps was a large sign:BESTIARY . A red arrow pointed to the right, below the wordsTHE MET . And a green arrow headed left:AMNH . We all followed Zimm around to the office in which he worked.

"Miss Cooper and Mr. Chapman are investigating Katrina Grooten's death."

"What a shocker," the young man said. "Saw the story in thePost. Couldn't believe it was someone I knew. Someone who worked here with me."

"Why don't you tell them about what you're doing here, and what her role in it was. Zimm's been with us since he was a high school student."

"I'm a graduate student at NYU. Started to come here when my family moved to Manhattan, fifteen years ago. Thought this was the coolest place in the world. Spent all my free time here, so my teacher encouraged me to do an internship while I was at Stuyvesant." Zimm had gone to one of New York City's premier public high schools, specializing in science and math, for which kids had to pass a special test for admission eligibility.

Mike smiled at him. "So you started working at the museum when Pluto was still a planet, huh?"

"Ah, Mr. Chapman. At least we're always controversial here," Mamdouba said. "You disagree with my friends at the planetarium?" "All I know is that for the first thirty-five years of my life, there were nine planets in the solar system. Now your museum decides Pluto's just an icy comet. I don't deal with change that well."

"Don't hold it against me, man." Zimm laughed. "I've got nothing to do with the astrophysicists. What we're doing down here is assembling and cataloging all the specimens that are under consideration for selection in the exhibit."

"Who's in charge?"

"Well, Elijah has the final word. I'm just the functionary. People bring me their artifacts, or photographs of the items. I inventory them, scan them into the computer, and pass the lists along to the joint committee, and to Elijah." He moved over to his desk and clicked the mouse of his computer; the program for the big show appeared on the screen. He scrolled down to give us a sampling of the thousands of proposed artifacts.

Mike stopped him halfway down the list ofB 's. "Whoa. You got a namesake here, Coop. They've got their own Blondie."

"Right behind you, Detective." Zimm pointed, and I looked at the large mason jar on the counter at my elbow. "Blondie--my personal favorite."

"Mine, too," Mike muttered to me. "Golden hair, lots of leg, and very painful when she lands on top of you." There in the jar was an albino tarantula, about the size of a soup dish. Dead, I hoped.

"This one was raised in the museum and lived here all her life. Kinda the department mascot. She's my candidate for the bestiary show."

I stepped away from the large spider and drew the conversation back to our mission. "Katrina, did you work with her on this?"

"Sure. I guess I saw her whenever she came to the museum."

"How often was that?"

"Last year? I'd say at first it was a couple of times a month. But by last fall, probably two or three times a week."

"I didn't realize she had to be here that often."

Zimm blushed. He looked over at Mamdouba but didn't offer any more information.

"What's your hesitation? She's not exactly going to get in trouble for anything at this point."

"Oh, well, I'm not sure how much of it was business she had to do for the Cloisters. I mean, I think she just discovered how interesting this place is. She'd do her work, all right. Faster than the rest of us. Then she'd just take off and wander around."

Mamdouba frowned. This seemed to be news to him. "In the museum, son?"

"Yeah."

The director took over the questioning. "Are you talking about areas open to the public, or did she have a security pass, like yours?"

"No, sir. Katrina had the basic ID to get into the building and access this office, but she couldn't get into any of the other departments--without help."

"What kind of help would that be, Zimm?"

The entomologist was fidgeting with a jar full of stiff bugs, rolling it around with one hand, gripping it by the lid. The label read,Lobster Roaches.

"Katrina made some friends here, Elijah. Borrowed their swipe cards. Nothing wrong with being curious about this place."

"Who loaned her their cards?" Mike asked.

Mamdouba tried to cut that avenue off. "Why don't you see me later on this, young man? Detective, this is an internal security matter. It has nothing to do with your investigation." "I hate to disagree with you, but it might be exactly what we're looking for. And what would have stopped her from walking off through the basement from right here, finding her way up into any part of the building?"

"Because, Mr. Chapman," the director snapped back, "this museum consists of twenty-three separate building structures. Most of them have no interconnection from this level, belowground, to any other."

"How did that happen?"

"It's called cash flow. The founders ran out of money early on, so the master plan was never completed. Wings were added piecemeal, and most of them are freestanding structures that only connect on the main floor or some corridor above. Who were Katrina's friends, Zimm?"

He was still twisting his bugs, their legs and antennae seeming to catch and entangle in each other like a delicate jigsaw puzzle. "I'm really bad on names. There was a woman, a postdoc in anthropology--they used to have lunch together all the time. But she doesn't work here anymore. I think she was British. And a few researchers in the African peoples department. Honestly, Elijah, I never hung out with any of them. Oh, the Rare Book Room--she loved to go there."

"Why?"

"Mr. Chapman, we have perhaps the most superb collection of books, journals, documents, and photographs ever assembled about the diversity of human cultures and the exploration of the natural world. Very fragile, some of it. And not accessible in our library. They must be kept in a restricted area, of course, or these papers would just walk out the door. Terribly valuable."

"Where is it?"

"Adjacent to the library. But again, in a separate building that you can only get into with a special security pass." Mamdouba was not pleased. "Very well, Zimm. After you show these people what they need to see, I'd still like to have a chat with you in my office."

He told us he would be available for any further questions that we had, but excused himself to go back upstairs.

"Didn't mean to jam you up."

"Not a problem, Detective. Everybody's so jumpy here about security, but you get a feel for people who respect the same things you do. It's not like Katrina was going to make off with first editions of hand- colored Audubon drawings from the collection. This place intrigued her, in a positive way. I don't think she'd ever been exposed to phenomena like this before."

Mike parked himself on a stool across the counter from Zimm. "You have anything going on with her?" The kid blushed again. "Nah. Went out for margaritas a couple of times after meetings, but she really wasn't interested in anything else. Not with me."

"How about Mamdouba? He and Katrina have any special relationship?"

Zimm looked at Mike as though he were crazy. "Him? That guy is all business all the time. You know what he's most interested in now? Burning whoever let Katrina break the rules. He's probably more concerned about that than the fact that she's dead. This may be the only kind of bureaucracy worse than academia, and I'm bouncing back and forth between the two of them."

"Don't try city government next. The two of us could outdo you in a flash with bureaucratic rules. And one other piece of advice: You meet a nice kid like Katrina and you wanna get laid? Get rid of the spiders. Especially the ones you got at home next to the bed." Mike kicked the stool away and stood up. "We want the same back-door view she had. The museum you don't see on the school tour. Is that going to be a problem for you?"

Zimm seemed energized by the idea. He rested his jar of roaches next to the tarantula. "I get my degree next month. I'm outta here." He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder like a hitchhiker. "Off to Chicago, to the Field Museum. Assistant curator of the department. Want to see anything else about the exhibition before we start walking?"

"If I give you a museum acquisition number, can you tell us where the piece is right now?"

The entomologist was ready to show off his computer program. He clicked off the screen with the alphabetical list of items and waited while Mike opened his notepad to the page he wanted.

"It's from the Met: 1983.752."

"Limestone sarcophagus, right? Mamdouba had me looking this one up yesterday."

Mike nodded and Zimm double-clicked, bringing up a color photo of the ancient coffin. The pale beige slab that had looked so macabre in the darkened hollow of the big truck seemed almost elegant as photographed against the faux-marble backdrop of the museum display.

As he read aloud a description of the markings, Mike and I studied the image on the screen. Just as Hal Sherman had told me, there were ornate carvings with rows of wild animals inscribed in exquisite detail, everything from boars and hyenas to wading birds and elephants. But for its grisly diversion to Port Newark, it would have been a perfect object for the bestiary show.

"Is this, um--the newspaper said Katrina was found in--"

"Yeah, this is it. What else does the entry mention?" While Zimm printed out two pages of information, he straightened up and recited the rest from memory. "The piece came in on December first of last year. Timothy Gaylord--he's the Egyptian curator--sent it over from the Met for consideration in the exhibition."

"Where was it kept while it was here?"

"The oversize things like that? They were all in the basement of ichthyology."

"Fish?"

"Yup."

"Why there?"

"I guess it was just a question of where there was the most room for storage on the lower level. They've got a back door there that opens onto the loading dock. It would be the logical place to bring the heaviest pieces in and out."

Mike scanned the printout. "This doesn't say when the sarcophagus left here."

"According to our records, it never did."

"Can you reverse the process? Can you plug in the dates--say, last Monday or Tuesday--and see what items shipped out of here?" Zimm went back to his computer program. He entered May 20 and May 21 into the search for outgoing loads. "Looks like one of our own trucks picked up some things to be transferred to the Smithsonian. Light stuff, though. Birds, shells, mollusks."

"The week before?"

"Yeah, here's a bigger truck. See? Here's a shipment going back to the Met on the fifteenth of May. Some heavy limestone in it. Probably stuff that's been rejected from the show. This sarcophagus wasn't the only one they were looking at. They had lots of Egyptian objects that were submitted. Hmmm. An Indian funeral stele with scenes from the life of Buddha." He brought up a picture, which showed Prince Siddhartha, who later became Buddha, riding off on his horse to renounce his nobility.