Still As Death (25 page)

Jeez, Sweeney
, she admonished herself.
What’s got into you?

Was she getting cynical about teaching? She wasn’t sure. On the good days, she loved her work, loved the moment when a student saw something in a work of art that he or she hadn’t known was there, and she loved the moment where she herself had one of those moments of illumination, where the act of teaching showed her something new. There hadn’t been many of those moments over the last year. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she was feeling that her career had hit a dead end at the university. It was becoming clearer and clearer that she wasn’t going to get any of the tenure-track jobs opening up over the next few years. With her lease up, she knew it
was a good time to start looking for a new job. She’d had some offers from small colleges in Vermont and Maine. There was something appealing about the idea of moving to a town where no one knew her, starting over. She had a vision of herself sitting by a roaring fire in a small log cabin somewhere on the side of a mountain, the General sprawled out on the floor. At the moment that she reminded herself that Ian would never consent to move to rural New England, she realized that the fantasy hadn’t included Ian. No, if she and Ian were going to be together, she was going to have to move to London.

So what about London? It wouldn’t be a bad thing to start over again at a new college or university, a fresh start, a fresh slate of students. British universities operated somewhat differently and she might be given more latitude to pursue her own interests. She sat on a bench for a few minutes, daydreaming. For a while now, she’d had another fantasy, about opening her own museum, a small private museum focused on funerary art. Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to her until now that she could probably do it, now that she’d sold some of her father’s paintings. And she could sell more if she wanted. It was hard to get used to the idea that a lack of funds was no longer an impediment to the things she wanted to do. It was almost paralyzing, having infinite opportunities. Of course, it was better than not having any opportunities at all.

She daydreamed for a few more minutes as she approached the rally. It was being held at the far end of the yard, and as she got closer she could hear an amplified voice and more voices cheering, and she saw the crowd of people—mostly women students—holding signs and listening to the older woman who was speaking from a makeshift podium. “But you all haven’t forgotten,” she called out, “because you’re here. And with your help we’ll make sure that women of your generation never forget.” Sweeney saw Jeanne and a few other faculty members standing next to the stage. The woman who was speaking finished up and the crowd cheered. Jeanne was worried about something. Even as she smiled and clapped her hands over her head, her lovely face was twisted in concern.

After the speech was over, Sweeney made her way up to the podium and waved at Jeanne, who smiled when she saw her and beckoned her over. “Hi, Sweeney, there are some people I want you to meet.” She introduced Sweeney to a couple of young women who she said were members of the WAWAs. They were both exceptionally pretty, with long limbs and blond hair pulled back in messy ponytails. As she talked to them about their goals for the organization, Sweeney couldn’t help thinking about what it had been like to arrive at the university as a sixteen-year-old, younger than everyone she knew, confused about what she was expected to do or be. She’d learned how to study, how to manage her time, how to write a perfect paper, but she’d had no idea how to negotiate the strange gender politics of a college campus. When Sweeney had arrived, the big controversy had been over the definition of date rape. Women on campus were speaking out about men who they said had pushed them to go further than they’d wanted, and a lot of Sweeney’s male friends—Toby included—had told her that they were terrified of kissing someone for fear they’d be called a rapist. Some colleges had even started asking students to sign contracts before any physical contact occurred.

One night, Sweeney had gotten drunk at a party in someone’s off-campus apartment, passed out on a couch, and awakened in a strange bedroom to find a guy she knew a little from an English class undoing her clothes. She had sat up and pushed him away, and luckily he’d slunk off, embarrassed, but she remembered she yelled after him, “What were you going to do?” and that when she’d seen him around campus, she’d felt humiliated and guilty, as though she’d tried to assault him.

She hoped things had changed for these women, with their summer sun–bleached hair and their hopeful faces.

She had asked Jeanne to introduce her to Susan Esterhaus, and when Jeanne called her over, Sweeney realized that Susan was the one who’d been speaking when she’d arrived. She had long curly gray hair, hippie style, but she was wearing an Armani pantsuit and diamond stud earrings as big as Sweeney’s thumbnail.

The diamonds glinted in the sun. “It’s great to meet you. Jeanne tells me you’re going to be the new faculty adviser.”

“Well, I don’t know. I want to make sure I have the time to really devote to it.”

“Well, it’s a terrific group of young women. Really inspiring.”

“Yeah, they seem great.” Sweeney didn’t want to commit to anything. “Is now a good time to talk about Karen?”

“Sure.” Susan Esterhaus motioned for Sweeney to step away from the crowd a bit. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“What was she like?” It seemed as good a place to start as any.

Susan thought for a moment. “I remember she always seemed like kind of an improbable feminist to me. I think she was from Greenfield or somewhere pretty rural, and I had the sense that all of these things we were talking about, equality, empowerment, they were all fairly new concepts for her. But she came alive in the WAWAs and working on this little arts magazine we put together. I was the editor and Karen and I got to know each other working on it.
WAC
, it was called, for Women’s Arts Collective. I don’t know why we came up with all of these sort of military acronyms, but we thought it was cool.” Susan smiled.

“Anyway. Karen. She was a talented artist and a talented art historian, and she was a real asset to our little group. I blamed myself for a long time after her death. I knew she was depressed. I tried to talk to her about it, but nothing doing. I didn’t know enough to know that I should have pushed her, should have called her family, whatever it took. But then, I suppose lots of college students get depressed and they don’t all kill themselves.”

“When did you notice that she was depressed?”

“God, it’s so long ago. I can’t quite pinpoint it, but sometime that fall, I guess. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure depressed is the right word. Withdrawn, maybe.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah, she seemed scared of something. That’s right. I wondered if it had to do with the robbery at the museum. You know about
that, right?” Sweeney nodded. “That would be enough to scare anyone. Why are you interested in Karen, anyway?”

“I’m working on a project,” Sweeney lied. “Women in the arts at the university.”

“Sounds good. I’d love to read it when you’re done. I studied sociology, so I wouldn’t really know, but I guess Karen was pretty hot shit at the museum. She had gone to Egypt on an archaeological dig the summer before she died, and she was some kind of an expert on jewelry or something. That was what she’d studied over in Egypt.”

“Really? That was her area of specialty? I didn’t know that. Did she ever talk to you about her work?”

“A bit. She said she’d gotten interested in the jewelry made for women. She said everyone thought of King Tut when they thought about Egypt but that there were all these other lives still to be revealed and discovered. She wrote some poetry for
WAC
about it.”

“Really? I’d love to see it.”

“I’ll see if I can find some old copies. You’ll have to endure my second-rate erotic stories, though.” She called to Jeanne. “Jeanne, you were around a lot in those days,” Susan said. “You were coming down from Smith nearly every weekend for a while there, weren’t you? I think that was right around the time Karen Philips died.”

Jeanne was watching some young women who had been part of the rally talking to a group of good-looking young men. She looked almost wistful, and Sweeney wondered if she missed the days when male students might have been yelling at the women. “Was I? I don’t remember.”

“Yeah, we were having all those intercampus planning meetings on ERA that fall and winter, and you were here a lot.”

“That’s right,” Jeanne said vaguely, hardly looking at them.

“So you must have known Karen Philips too?” Sweeney asked.

“I guess so. Not well, though.” She waved to someone across the way. “I’ve got to talk to Catherine. Sweeney, feel free to stick around and talk to some more of the students.” She glanced at them quickly and hurried away.

“Is Jeanne okay?” Susan asked once they were alone again. “She seems a little on edge today.”

Sweeney told her about the murders at the museum. “I know I’m a little on edge,” she said. But she realized that there seemed to be something else wrong with Jeanne. She had seen Jeanne Ortiz angry, excited, annoyed, and unreasonable. But she’d never seen her scared.

WAITING FOR SWEENEY at one of the outside tables at a café on Brattle Street, Quinn found he was nervous in a way he hadn’t been since he’d been about fourteen, meeting a girl for the first time at a pizza place around the corner from his house. He’d imagined sitting at a place like this with Sweeney, imagined the hot late-summer day, the way the air smelled and the way his glass of white wine would taste. But he hadn’t imagined that she’d be meeting him to tell him what her boyfriend had to say about international art thieves.

It was stupid. He had to put the whole thing out of his mind. She wasn’t the right woman for him. He knew that. He wasn’t smart enough, he wasn’t educated enough, he wasn’t a good enough dresser. Hell, he probably didn’t make enough money. They would be friends, or whatever it was that they were, and that would have to be it.

But still, when he spotted her crossing the street and coming toward him, wearing a pair of khaki pants that came to the middle of her calves and a bright aqua T-shirt that matched the blue flip-flops she was wearing, he felt everything stop for a minute and it was all he could do to stop watching her, stop watching her long limbs swinging
as she walked like a coltish kid stop staring at her lightly tanned arms, her throat, her neck …

“Hey,” she said, sitting down and touching him lightly on the arm. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No problem. You want something?” He’d ordered a slice of pizza, though it had come out fancier than he’d expected, with goat cheese and little pieces of herbs on it, and now he wasn’t even hungry.

“Maybe an iced coffee?” Quinn gestured to the waitress, and Sweeney ordered the coffee. Then she turned to him and said, “So Ian says to tell you that his friend in London, the one he mentioned? Well, he said something about a Japanese collector who was looking for something like the canopic chest. And he said he’d heard about a connection with organized crime in Boston. Same guys who were talked about for the 1979 theft. Naki Haruhito was the name he got. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No, but I’ll have to ask my contact at the FBI. Hey, tell him thanks. This may turn out to be important.”

“Sure.” There was an awkward silence. That had been the reason for their meeting and now they were finished and her coffee hadn’t even come.

“How’s everything at the museum?” The building had opened to the public again today, though they had decided to close the basement gallery, mostly to discourage gawkers, since they’d already gotten everything from the crime scene that they could.

“Pretty weird. I’ve only been over a few times since … since Willem’s death.” The waitress came with a tall glass mug of dark reddish coffee and ice. Sweeney tipped some cream in and stirred, her loose hair falling across her face. “They haven’t said who’s going to be in charge, not even in the interim, so we don’t know what to do with ourselves. How close are you to solving this?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “It seems as though it had to be someone from the museum. Or …” He didn’t want to tip his hand about what they’d found on the tapes, but on the other hand, maybe she knew something about the kid who had been at the museum.
They’d gotten something on him from Denny Keefe, who had also identified him as the student who had given him trouble about bringing a bag in the night of the opening. Keefe had said the kid wanted to see Jeanne Ortiz. She came down and got him and they went up to her office. The dean of students had checked out the tape and identified him as Trevor Ferigni, a sophomore from California.

“You know someone named Trevor Ferigni?” Quinn asked.

“Sounds familiar. Who is he?”

“He was at the museum the night of your opening, apparently. And he was at the museum the day Willem Keane was killed.”

“Oh, right. The kid who was following Jeanne around. What was he doing?”

“He says he’s a former student of Ms. Ortiz’s and he had to talk to her about something. He was up in the gallery where she was working for a half hour or so, didn’t see anything strange, left and went to the library.”

“What did she say?”

“She backed him up. Said he was with her the whole time.”

“So what was he doing at the museum?”

“He says he had to talk to Ortiz. But there was something weird about the whole thing. I don’t know. She seemed nervous, he seemed nervous. I was just wondering if you knew anything.”

She grinned at him. “Have I heard any gossip? No. Can’t say I have.” She’d finished her coffee. “There’s something strange, though. She was around the university a lot during the time leading up to Karen’s suicide. I found out from someone who also knew Karen. Jeanne seemed really nervous when I asked her about it.”

“You think she had something to do with Karen Philips’s death.” He told Sweeney that he’d looked at the file and was pretty certain they’d investigated thoroughly.

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out how Karen’s death and the collar are connected. Maybe she was involved in hiding the fact that there was something wrong with the collar, that it had been stolen. Or, I was thinking, maybe she figured out how valuable it was
and she stole it herself.” She looked up triumphantly at him, the expression on her face identical to the one Megan got when she’d pulled off the feat of removing her shoes or knocking a bowl of cereal onto the floor.