The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (39 page)

Clem went on, "There's a gold mine in these vaults. Some of the collections are priceless. And nobody wants to upset that apple cart." Mike laughed. "Not even the mammal man?"

"Socarides? Are you kidding? He sits on some of the most valuable bones in that museum. Have they let you see the elephant room?"

Mike and I both answered, "No."

"There's a maze of staircases that winds up to the attic. It's a fantastic sight. Tiers and tiers of huge elephant skulls. Below them, the actual bones from their bodies, all draped in plastic coverings. Then a wall full of their teeth, ten pounds each. You know what an elephant's skeleton weighs? Half a ton. And then you add to their value the fact that some were gifts of famous people. Those sad gray beasts shot by Teddy Roosevelt or donated by P. T. Barnum."

"I guess just the worth of their ivory would make them even more treasured."

"The tusk vault, that's what you'd want to see."

That word again. "Now this one's a specific place?"

"Oh, yes. But it's so well hidden within the museum that most of the people who work there don't even know it exists."

"Why does it?" "It's supposed to be a secret, a very small room with a dark green steel door. I've never seen it. Built, of course, to prevent the theft of the tusks, which is why none of us were ever able to find out where it is. Millions of dollars' worth of ivory. Not only from the elephants, but, even more rare, from creatures like narwhals."

"These rooms, these special rooms, are there several of them, Clem?"

"Dozens. For a variety of different purposes."

It was clear that at our meeting the previous morning, Mamdouba hadn't been forthcoming when we asked about private vaults.

Mike looked over at me. "Suppose you could work up enough probable cause to get a warrant. You know, get us in the museum to look for something. Like--like arsenic. Like a boat ticket to Cairo. Could we take Clem in with us and get her to show us around?"

"I'm still stuck on the probable-cause piece. We can talk about it when we leave here. Maybe we can get Zimm to help us, without a warrant."

"There's probably nothing I can find for you inside that place that he doesn't already know about," Clem said. "You should push him to help. I think he had a thing for Katrina. He tagged along for a few of our dinners."

"As long as you bring that up, did you ever meet Pierre Thibodaux?"

"Several times, just at museum receptions and meetings. I wasn't part of his world, that's for sure."

"Did Katrina ever talk about him?"

Clem blushed. "I don't want to say anything that would make you think badly of her."

"She's dead. About six decades prematurely, if you ask me. I don't care whether she liked married men or monkeys, I just need to know the truth," Mike said.

"Katrina fancied Monsieur Thibodaux. I think she'd met him in France, actually, before she moved to the States."

"She talked about that?"

"Never. She denied it to me, in fact. But we were at a meeting once, in his office. Right at the beginning of the exhibition planning. Thibodaux noticed her immediately. Came right up and kissed her, both cheeks. Thought he had recognized her from somewhere. Maybe that little French museum she worked in before coming to the Cloisters. Talked to her for about five minutes."

"What did they say?"

"Sorry. English, Danish, Inuit. I don't know any French. I didn't stay around to listen."

"Did you get the sense that anything sexual had gone on?"

"Heavens, no. She may have wanted it to happen at one point, but after the--" Clem broke her sentence abruptly. "After last June--"

"After the rape?"

"Exactly. When that happened, she just lost her spark. Withdrew from all of us for a while. Then I got canned and moved away to London. I'll be devastated if Thibodaux had anything to do with--um--with hurting Katrina. I set her to work on him."

"How? What do you mean?"

"I saw the way he eyed her, and the way she responded to him. I didn't think there would be any harm in trying to use him as a sympathizer. Primitive artworks aren't exactly the centerpiece of the Met collection. Why would he care if we emptied out their closets?"

"I knew he lied to us about Katrina, from the first time we talked to him," Mike said to me before turning back to Clem. "Did he bite?"

"I think he nibbled at Katrina's skin a little." Clem laughed. "But he had no interest in our project to repatriate bones. She told me he gave her a tough lecture about the impossibility of returning artifacts to African communities. How the objects are displayed in our museums with a respect uncommon in their homelands. He told her they'd be in greater danger if they were sent back to some of the villages from which they came."

That sounded like the Thibodaux we had interviewed. I would try to get Clem alone later and see whether she knew any specifics that might contradict the director's description of his relationship with Katrina, things she would be reluctant to discuss in front of Mike.

"The others from the Met," Mike asked, "how well did you know any of them?"

Clem mentioned some names of her peers from the joint exhibition who worked at the other museum. I jotted down the ones who were not familiar to me.

"Any of the curators?"

"Well, Anna Friedrichs, of course, and Erik Poste. They both were involved in the bestiary show, so we had regular meetings together. Timothy Gaylord, too."

Gaylord was due back in the city today. Perhaps he would be less of an enigma once we met him this afternoon.

"Do you know about their relationships with Katrina?" "Superficial, I would think. Erik's family was South African, and his father had done a lot of work on the African continent. Exploring, hunting, collecting kind of things. And Anna, of course, had professional expertise in primitive art. We both thought they'd be good candidates to try to recruit, you know? Have some well-respected scholars to back us up."

"Did Katrina have any luck?"

"We failed on both fronts. The only one I asked her to approach alone was Thibodaux. He seemed so obviously taken by her. Erik Poste? We took him to dinner together one night. We knew he was coming over to Natural History late in the day--he did most of his work there in the evenings, when he finished at the Met. Must have spent our week's salary wining and dining him. He was shocked, that's all. So aggravated at Katrina."

"Why?"

"Erik didn't even listen to the stories we told him, about graves of real people that have been plundered. About the town in Namibia in which they were digging a new roadway. They found the graves of twenty-six white settlers from the 1930s, so they were moved and reburied with pomp and ceremony. In the same plot there was the grave of a black native woman and her baby. Those two remains were taken to the local museum for dissection and `study.' Just a few years ago this happened. And Erik Poste? Oblivious to it."

"But what made him mad?" "That Katrina had such a brilliant eye for medieval artwork. That he and Bellinger had agreed that she could begin to help with acquisitions for the Met and the Cloisters. Erik complimented her work, her memos, her opinions. It was quite a tirade. He berated her for throwing it all away because of some tribal voodoo. I don't think he heard a word I told him."

"And Ms. Friedrichs?"

"I don't know what's worse. Erik is completely absorbed in his work. It's all European and anything but primitive. Anna, well--thisis her field. All her education and background have been in aboriginal cultures. She nodded her head and stroked us when we talked about what we wanted to do, but I don't think she cared a whit about helping us in reality. I think she's a phony. You know what Anna and I fought about on the committee for the joint show?"

"No idea."

"When Margaret Mead came back from the South Pacific, among the treasures she brought were shrunken heads. Maori tribesmen shrunken heads. They were on display for decades in the museum. It was only recently that they were withdrawn from exhibit. Anna wanted to bring them out of mothballs for the big exhibition. Taking on Margaret Mead is like taking on Mother Teresa. And trust me, Anna thinks she's the reincarnation of Mead, taken to a higher level and a haughtier locale."

"Why higher?" "'Cause she's queen of all things primitive in a damnart museum, not surrounded by stuffed squirrels and T. rex fossils in Natural History."

I made some notes to ask Ms. Friedrichs about her feelings about the repatriation of human remains.

"You know this guy Timothy Gaylord?" Mike asked.

"Now there's a man with problems. Nobody knows quite what to do with mummies these days." Clem laughed. "The Met's got a fortune invested in Egyptian tomb relics. Used to be quite acceptable to dig up the dead. We put ours away."

"Your what?"

"Mummies. The anthropology department at Natural History also has a vast collection of mummies, even though nobody associates us with that kind of thing. They're mostly stored now, too. In big black metal boxes. Some of them were sent on loan from the Met half a century ago and never returned. Boy, did Gaylord want those back."

"Do you know where in the museum they store those mummies?" I was thinking that might be a likely place to secrete a sarcophagus without calling attention to it. Maybe even hide the remains of the princess that were removed to make room for Katrina.

"Used to be in the tower attic. But it got so cramped up there that I think they moved most of them to the basement." An even more logical place to keep the heavy limestone coffin, as we originally figured.

There was a knock on the door and Laura opened it to say good morning and see if there were things she needed to do. I got her started on some assignments.

"I'll leave you and Clem to handle the mail," I told Mike. "I'm going to the grand jury, then to Sarah's office to see how she's managing the cases that came in over the weekend. And Timothy Gaylord. Would you give him a call to find out when we can meet with him later today?"

The meeting with Sarah and several of the assistants in our unit took almost two hours. An end-of-semester party at Columbia College had turned into a drunken orgy, and a Barnard freshman woke up naked in the bed of a guy she had never seen before and didn't remember meeting. A homeless woman had been raped while sleeping on the seat of a subway train, in the last car, shortly after it pulled out of the Times Square station. And a teacher at a local high school was arrested for exchanging top grades for oral sex with four of the sophomore girls in his biology class.

"Where's Mike?" I asked, after greeting Laura and coming back into my office.

"Two guys from the DA's squad came by looking for you. Told him something urgent was up and he flew out of here with them."

It was unlike him to leave without an explanation, but I assumed I would get one soon. 34

Clem handed me the printouts of her latest e-mail responses. "On the Natural History side, nothing from Mamdouba. That doesn't surprise me, though. Socarides is the guy in charge of African mammals. His is sort of intriguing."

It began with a courteous salutation and the appropriate expression of concern about Katrina's death. Then he launched into a defensive description of the uses of arsenic in taxidermy, asking for Clem's telephone number so he could learn as soon as possible what Katrina had said about her health in the weeks before she died.

"The others are from the Met staff. Bellinger and Friedrichs. I'd expect to hear from them. She worked so closely with Hiram, and I think she trusted him. And Anna--well, it would be strange if she didn't express her condolences. Nothing out of the ordinary. If I'd ever thought I'd have so many dinner invitations, though, I would have been back for a visit long before this. You've got everyone vying for my companionship."

"Keep tapping away at the keyboard, if you don't mind. Answer them all, okay? When you get some conversation going, why don't you mention that Katrina talked to you about the bones she was looking for. See if that gooses anybody."

I was on the phone with one of the guys in the Special Victims Unit when Mike reappeared in my doorway. "It's only a little bit past noon and I got my first collar. Piece of cake."

"A homicide I don't know about?"

"Nope. Part of your fan club." He made a ratcheting noise with the teeth of his handcuffs as he closed them and lifted the back flap of his blazer to loop them into the waist of his pants. "Your favorite stalker."

"Shirley Denzig? Picketing with the S and M group?"

"Yeah. Joe Roman and the guys from the squad came by to let you know they got a call she was downstairs, so I went along in case they needed me to ID her."

"But how did she know about the demonstration? Why'd she come?"

"The all-news radio station was running it. Courthouse brouhaha. Sex crimes prosecutor steps in shit at the DA's office. She couldn't wait to get here and add to your aggravation. They're fingerprinting upstairs as we speak. Grand larceny, three counts, from the cases at the Waldorf. Aggravated harassment for the calls to you. Oh, and we tossed in criminal possession of a weapon, third degree, for the loaded gun she's got in her backpack."

CPW third degree was probably the charge that would bring Denzig the most jail time.

"That should make you feel better. Remind me to tell you about last night," I said.

"You're joking, aren't you? Something happened after we split?"

"Save it for the right moment, okay?" I nodded in Clem's direction. No need to spook a witness with reminders of how crazily some of our defendants behave, how loosely tethered they are to reality.

I felt an enormous surge of relief at the news of Denzig's apprehension.

"You need to sign a corroborating affidavit for the complaint."

"A pleasure, Detective. Which of my esteemed colleagues is catching today?"

Mike lowered his voice. "McKinney's giving it to Ellen Gunsher."

"Not a prayer," I practically shouted the words at Mike, coming out from behind my desk to pass him to get to McKinney's office down at the end of the hallway.

He grabbed my elbow as I tried to brush by. "The gun. That's what she's supposed to handle. That's what her unit does. Let it go, Coop."