Still As Death (29 page)

“I know my parents saved some of Karen’s things,” she said, pulling the string on a bare lightbulb hanging from the rafters. “But I don’t know about her poetry. My mother turned her room into a
sewing room, and I think they gave most of her clothes and books to the Salvation Army. But I feel like I remember some of the papers and notebooks and posters and things from her room at school being up here. I had to go with one of my aunts and help pack up her room at school. My parents couldn’t face it. And I think those boxes just went right up in the attic.”

Sweeney felt her spirits rise. Could her luck really be that good?

They both looked around at the piles and piles of boxes, lying in corners of the large space, in deep shadow. It was stifling hot and Sweeney could feel her shirt slowly being soaked with perspiration. Diana looked a little disturbed. “Well,” she said. “I’m not sure where it would be, but let me just …” She started with the pile that was right in front of them, clearing a thick layer of dust off the top and opening the box. “That’s books. Not Karen’s, though.” She closed it and tried another. “Hmmm. This seems to be baby clothes.” She tried a few more as Sweeney looked on awkwardly, not sure if she should offer to help.

Having finished with the pile, she stood up and looked around. “The problem is, I’m not sure where it would be.” She wiped her forehead. “God, it must be one hundred degrees up here.”

“Can I help by looking in those over there?” Sweeney offered, pointing to a pile of cardboard boxes in the opposite corner.

“Sure. It should say ‘Karen’ on it. I remember marking it with a pen.”

They searched for a half hour but came up with nothing, and when Diana said that she was feeling a little faint, Sweeney knew it was her cue to say, “It seems like maybe it’s going to be too hard to find it.”

“Let me just look in one more place.”

Seeing the sweat dripping down Diana’s face, Sweeney felt suddenly guilty and said, “I want to tell you something. I’m not really doing a paper about women at the university. I’m an art historian. I was curating an exhibition, and on the opening night a few weeks ago, someone was murdered at the Hapner Museum. It was during
a robbery and, well, I’ve been looking into the 1979 robbery and I’m wondering if Karen knew more about it than she told the police. Maybe that was the reason she killed herself, or she was killed because she knew something that someone didn’t want revealed. I’m sorry. I just thought it might be easier to find out about her if I didn’t tell you what I really thought about her death.”

Diana Sturgeon smiled at her. “I figured you were hiding something. But I got a good feeling from you so I was willing to let it go.” She stood for a moment, looking around at the boxes. “Wait a second. I feel like such an idiot. I think I know where it is. Follow me.”

They went back down the stairs and Diana led the way into a small bedroom tucked under the eaves. When she turned on one of the old-fashioned bedside lamps, Sweeney could see the pink wallpaper, with its pattern of vines and roses.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it,” she said. “This was Karen’s room. I think my mother put the box in her closet.” She opened the narrow closet door and came out with a cardboard box.

“This is it,” she said, opening it and taking out a high school yearbook. “I’ll leave you to go through it. I’ll be getting dinner ready downstairs. Let me know if you need anything.”

On top of the items piled in the box was a yellow scarf, hand-knit by a beginning knitter by the look of it. The yellow was a particularly unattractive shade, but it must have had sentimental value to have been saved. Underneath the scarf was a stack of photographs. They mostly showed Karen clowning around with some teenage girls. One of the girls in a number of the pictures was clearly a younger Gerry Tiswell. But they all seemed to have been taken in Greenfield. There weren’t any from the university.

There was a stack of letters next, the envelopes held together with a rubber band, and it took Sweeney a long time to go through them, removing each letter from its envelope and scanning it for any reference to the university or the museum. Again, most of the letters seemed to be artifacts of Karen’s childhood and adolescence.
There were girlish notes to friends, gossiping about other girls, and boys they liked, and later, letters from friends about what they had done over the summer. There was one from Gerry Tiswell describing her summer visit to her grandparents’ house in Ohio, and then a few during Karen’s freshman year at college describing her friends’ own experiences in college. But, of course, there wasn’t anything to indicate what was going on with Karen, save a few vague references to whether a party had ended up being fun or if a boy Karen was interested in had asked her out. In a manila envelope, she found a copy of the Women’s Arts Collective’s magazine, with a poem by Karen on page 14.

Lord Carnarvon

Who owns these old things
Dug up, the faces golden beneath the years of earth?
Who owns these princesses, imprisoned in coffins and tombs?
They lie waiting in this dark room, waiting for him to come discover them,
steal them, imprison them, take their bodies for his own.
These dark hallways hold all manner of sin. He cares about possession. He
knows only how to own.
He makes of her a mummy, her heart inside a jar.
He takes her blood, her bones, her jaw.
He locks her in a tomb.
When the other men discover her, she’s a dusty relic, just a box of bones.

Sweeney read the poem again. There was something about it that she liked. The logic was a little hard to pin down, but she thought that Karen was writing about the mummies discovered by adventurers like Carnarvon. She was identifying with the mummies, their organs gone, locked in tombs. Her friends were right. She must have been depressed to write a poem like that. There was a kind of violence to it that Sweeney couldn’t quite get out of her mind, even after she’d turned to the other items in the box.

She browsed through postcards and a few paperback novels and then found a thin sketchbook at the bottom of the box, Karen’s name on the front.

The first few sketches in the book were of a sleeping cat, followed by a nicely drawn hand and a portrait of a woman. They weren’t bad, the angles of the hand nicely shaded and the woman—who Sweeney assumed must have been Diana and Karen’s mother from their resemblance to her—well proportioned and pretty.

But it was the final few sketches that made Sweeney stand up and reach for her car keys. They showed a nude man, looking over one shoulder, his back muscles well defined, a faraway look on his face.

Though she’d captured the basics of the man’s anatomy, Karen hadn’t been good enough to make the muscles look real, but she was good enough so that Sweeney could recognize the man’s face.

It was a much younger Fred Kauffman.

“TELL ME ABOUT MARTIN MCMASTER,” Quinn told Denny Keefe. “Tell me how he convinced you to do it.”

Denny Keefe sat silently in the interview room, his hands in front of him on the table, his shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I don’t know who Martin McMaster is. I never met him.”

“You didn’t need to meet him. Your cousin Vinnie Keefe was the go-between. All you had to do was tell him when the staff meeting was and arrange with him the details of the theft. Then McMaster’s men would carry it out.”

“I told you. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Vinnie in years. We’re not a close family. I got beat up, for Christ’s sake. They almost killed me. You can’t really think I was in on it, can you?” He was pleading with him, and for a moment Quinn wondered whether he’d gotten it wrong, but then he saw something in Keefe’s eyes that made him see what must have happened.

“You did get beat up. I think the plan was that you would get beat up, so it would look authentic. It worked pretty well. Nobody suspected you because of how badly you got beat up. I don’t think that part of it was according to plan. Not your plan, anyway. I think that
either the guys who were carrying out the burglary went overboard, trying to keep up the charade, or more likely, they wanted to scare you. I think they wanted you to know that they held your life in their hands and if you ever told anyone about your role in the theft, they would finish the job.” As he said the words, he knew he was right.

But Keefe, his eyes scared now, kept up the charade. “I’m telling you. I was working, and the last thing I remember is someone behind me. I must have gone into the booth first and pressed the silent alarm. I just don’t remember. That happens with head injuries, you know.” He looked from Quinn to Ellie, willing them to believe him.

“Denny, if you tell us everything that happened, any judge you come before is going to know that you cooperated. Your role in this was pretty small. What happened? Did Olga see something all those years ago? Did she know who carried out the theft? Did she tell Willem? Did Vinnie and McMaster’s friends have to kill them in order to keep it quiet?”

Now he just looked confused. Quinn’s warning bells went off. He’d been on sure footing. He knew he had. But now Keefe seemed genuinely bewildered. He regrouped. “Or did McMaster’s guys come back for another try? Did you tell them about the opening? Did you tell them that it would be a good time to hit the museum?”

“What? No.”

Quinn looked deeply into Keefe’s tired gray eyes. There was something there. He knew it. But it wasn’t time yet. They would wait. He’d learned this over the years. Time was the best antidote to untruths. People eventually grew tired of lying. It was exhausting. He’d seen people kill themselves because they were so tired of lying. Hardened criminals had walked into headquarters and turned themselves in because they just couldn’t stand to keep it up anymore. It was hard to live with a lie, he told himself. Eventually Denny Keefe would break down.

“Well, I’ve got lots of time,” he told Keefe, standing up and nodding to Ellie. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do, actually. In fact, we have all the time in the world.”

“They found Hutchinson,” she said once they were out in the hall. “He says he left Keane at five-thirty or so. He was in town on business and Keane wanted to talk to him, to reassure him, Hutchinson says, that they were taking steps to make the museum even more secure in light of the attempted theft. They chatted. Hutchinson says he seemed as usual.

“Where was he? Why couldn’t we get hold of him?” “He and his wife decided to go up to their house in Westchester County. Their ‘country house,’ he called it.” She raised her eyebrows. “La-di-da. He said they decided on the spur of the moment and they keep extra clothes up there, so they called the butler when they arrived.”

“And the guys who interviewed him thought he was telling the truth?”

“I guess so. We could make him come up for questioning.”

“I don’t know. What do you think about Keefe in there?”

“He’s lying. You can tell.” She still looked miserable, and he knew they were going to have to talk about what had happened at Jason Fowler’s apartment. But for now, he decided to pretend it had never happened.

“I think you’re right. Well, it’s true what I told him. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

IT WASN’T UNTIL SHE’D PULLED up in front of Fred’s house that Sweeney realized how stupid it was to confront him this way. He’d been having an affair with Karen. He’d probably killed her and staged her suicide. He wasn’t going to be particularly happy when Sweeney told him she knew.

She turned off her car and got her cell phone out of her bag, dialing Quinn’s number and listening to the phone ring a few times before his voice came on, saying, “This is Tim Quinn. Please leave a message or a page.” She hesitated for a moment, then clicked off the phone and looked up at the house. Lacey had heard the car and was standing in the kitchen window, looking out to see who it was. She looked so perfectly normal standing there that Sweeney felt a sudden surge of confidence. What could happen with Lacey there? She would tell Fred what she’d discovered and tell him she would drive him to turn himself in. If he got violent, she and Lacey together should be able to subdue him. Lacey could call the police. She got out of the car and, holding the sketchbook under one arm, she rang the doorbell. Lacey answered almost immediately.

“Sweeney? I was wondering who that was? Come on in.” Sweeney stepped into the warm house, feeling again the utter normality
of it. Lacey had brightly colored sweaters piled up on the table in the dining room and Sweeney could smell chicken roasting. “Do you want a glass of wine? I was just pouring for us.”

“No, thanks. I was hoping I could talk to Fred.”

Lacey studied her. There was something a little cold, a little suspicious in her eyes. “Sure. He’s in his study. You sure you don’t want anything?”

“No. I’m fine, Lacey. Thank you.”

“Okay.” There it was again. Her eyes narrowed a little and she said, “You know where he is, right? Down the hall on the right?”

“Yeah. I’ll find it. Thanks.” Sweeney went down the hall to Fred’s study. He was sitting at his desk, reading, and when he looked up at her, she could see how tired he was, and how scared.

“Sweeney. Hi. What are you doing here?”

“Hi.” She left the door open and stood in front of him, the sketchbook under her arm, and said, “I’m sorry, Fred. I know. I know what you did.”

“What do you mean?” But he was bluffing. She could tell.

“Come on, Fred. I have proof.”

He put his head in his hands, then pushed the papers aside, and when he looked up at her, she could see he had tears in his eyes.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew someone was going to find out. It’s been awful the last few weeks. I can’t sleep. I haven’t been eating. I feel like I might jump out of my skin any minute. What are you going to do about it?”

“Does Lacey know?”

“I don’t think so,” Fred said. “Though she knows that something’s wrong. She’s been patient with me, but she knows something’s going on.”

“Fred?” Sweeney started and turned to find Lacey standing in the doorway, holding a knife. She’d been cooking. It made sense she’d have a knife, but something about the way she stood there made Sweeney nervous.