Still As Death (32 page)

“No. He was as Willem Keane always was, calm, cool, and collected. Except for when he’d seen a piece he wanted. Then it was as though he was looking at a pretty girl.”

“Thank you,” Quinn said. “I appreciate your help. I’ll let you know when there’s some news.”

He sat at his desk for a minute, thinking, then went back to the conference room and found the copies of the security tapes that he and Ellie had looked at already. He popped the relevant tape into the VCR, fast-forwarding to the right section. There were Hutchinson and Keane coming out of the museum, Keane carrying a trench coat elegantly slung over his arm. He watched Keane wave as Hutchinson walked away. Bingo. He had it. Keane had dumped the stopper, which meant that there hadn’t been a robbery at all, which meant that Keane had killed Olga Levitch, which meant that someone else, someone at the museum, had killed Keane.

He jumped up, leaving all of his things on his desk and dialing Sweeney’s cell phone number as he headed out to his car. When she didn’t answer, he sped up, peeling out and disobeying every traffic rule as he tried to make his way through the rush-hour traffic on Mass. Ave.

“Come on,” he yelled at the crush of cars and buses. “Come on!” He checked the time of Sweeney’s message again. She’d left for the museum more than an hour ago. He might already be too late.

SWEENEY STOOD WITH HER BACK against one of the mobile storage units, the pain from Tad’s grip on her arm making her dizzy.

“Please, let go of me,” she whispered. “Just let go of me and we can talk.”

“You have to understand,” Tad was pleading with her. “I didn’t mean to do it. We were … fighting. I told him I knew about Olga, and he hit me. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what happened. I think all those years of … of him keeping me hanging, using me when it suited his purposes, never telling me what was going to happen next. I think it all came out right then. I hit him back. We were up on the fourth floor, next to the balcony, and I couldn’t stop hitting him. He was bent over the railing and he looked at me and the look was so ugly that I didn’t care anymore, and I let him have it and he went over.”

Tad took a deep breath. “I couldn’t believe no one heard him fall. The museum was closed to the public, so Denny or whoever must have been off doing something else. And the staff were all over in the annex, I suppose. I waited up there for almost an hour, waiting for someone to come and get me. Then I heard you and that cop
down on the third floor, and I went back over to the annex and sat down in my office, and pretty soon I heard the sirens.”

He had relaxed his grip as he talked, and Sweeney felt herself relax too as she understood what he was telling her.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did Willem have to kill Olga? Was it related to Karen Philips?”

“In a way. You were right that Karen Philips knew about the falcon collar. But there was something else too. Willem raped her. I supposed that’s the only word. If he didn’t force her physically, he forced her all the same.”

He saw the confused look on Sweeney’s face and went on. “It started when we were in Egypt that summer before her death. Willem was leading a trip and I was along as his assistant. Karen and a couple of other students came along too. Egypt was where we … where he let me … where we were together sometimes. I think he allowed it to happen there because we were away from everything familiar. He was somehow able to pretend he enjoyed it when we were there.”

“So Willem wasn’t gay?”

“No. He was mercenary about sexuality. He did whatever he needed to do to get what he wanted. He needed me. He knew that. In order to be a success as curator and then director of the museum, he needed me organizing things for him. He needed me to stay at the university. I’d had job offers at lots of places, but he convinced me to stay and work for him. He was amazing. He knew exactly when I had given up, when he needed to throw me a few scraps to keep me hanging. It was very … one-sided.” He looked embarrassed.

“In Egypt, I could tell that he was going to force the issue with Karen. I knew him so well, I knew when he was in his predatory mode, but I didn’t know how she would respond. There had been a lot of young women before her, and I have to say that most of them were willing participants. But with her it was different. I saw her one morning and I just knew. She looked … defeated. That’s the only
word I can think of. She looked like she’d had all the spirit beaten out of her.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone?”

“Because she needed him too. Karen was from a working-class family. She needed fellowships if she was going to go to graduate school. She needed Willem and she knew it. I recognized the look on her face that morning. She was trapped. Just like I was trapped.”

“Did the relationship continue once you were back at the university?”

“Yes. I think she probably did what she had to do to stay on Willem’s good side. I caught them once, in his office. I’m still haunted by the look on her face.” He shuddered.

“But then came this thing with the jewelry. Willem was so excited about the Arthur Maloof donation. The mask was going to put the museum’s collection on the map. I suspected from the beginning that there was something wrong with the provenance, and I told him so, but Willem couldn’t see past that golden face. It was like he was in love and wasn’t willing to hear a bad word about his beloved. At some point I realized he didn’t even care.”

“So the piece was taken out of Egypt illegally?”

“Oh, yeah. Maloof had gotten it on the black market and created all these fake documents to make it look real. He was a publicity junkie. He loved having people hold him up as this great philanthropist, loved having galleries named after him. He was without a doubt the most arrogant man I’ve ever met in my life. Anyway, Willem thought everything was fine, but then Karen was researching the jewelry and she discovered that the falcon collar wasn’t what the file said it was. It was a stupid mistake. Maloof must have gotten it mixed up, but she went to Willem and said that she had looked into the provenance and it was suspect. She said she thought they should look at all the other provenances again, including the paper trail on the mask. She was worried Maloof had been dealing on the black market.”

“What did Willem say?”

“He told her that she couldn’t say a word to anyone. That if she did, he would make sure she never went to graduate school. Ever.” Tad grimaced. “He was actually proud of himself when he told me this. He thought he’d taken care of it.”

Sweeney knew what had to come next. “So he killed her and made it look like suicide?”

Tad looked surprised. “No, it really was suicide. I think after she went to him about the collar and he reminded her that her entire future was dependent on him, she realized she really was
stuck
. I think she felt that there was no way for her to get out of the situation she found herself in. That’s generally why people kill themselves, isn’t it? They don’t see any options.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’ve always felt so guilty about that. I knew and I didn’t tell anyone.”

Sweeney couldn’t argue with him. He’d had it in his power to save Karen Philips’s life.

Tad gave her a small smile. “And then you came along. I think I’d forgotten all about the collar. When Karen died, Willem and I thought the questions would die too. But then there you were, asking me to go find the collar so you could put it on display. I told Willem, and of course he said there was no way we were going to risk exhibiting it. If someone else noticed the discrepancies in the file, they were going to start asking questions too and then questions might arise about the entire Maloof collection. So he told me to take the collar out of storage and hide it somewhere. We would just pretend that it had disappeared or been misplaced and hope you wouldn’t ask too many questions.”

It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for her, Sweeney realized. It was her fault that Olga was dead. Willem too, when it came right down to it.

She was thinking about this when they heard voices from the other end of the storeroom and she looked up and saw Quinn standing there.

There was something about the look on his face that sealed it,
that told her what she needed to know. She saw it in his half-stern, half-hopeful eyes. He was breathless, a hand on his holster, searching her face for a clue as to what was going on. He had thought something had happened to her. He was terrified that something was going to happen to her, Sweeney realized.
Oh, Tim, Oh, Tim
.

She smiled at him, seeing his face dissolve in relief, and her own heart rose a little. “You have to listen to him,” she said, pointing to Tad. “You have to hear what he has to say.”

QUINN SAT DOWN across from Tad Moran on the floor of the storage room to hear the rest of the story. Sweeney sat next to him, quiet and still. He was still reeling from the sense of relief he’d felt upon seeing she was okay, and he almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

“She was a sharp old thing,” Tad continued. “I always suspected it must have come from living in the USSR, from feeling always under surveillance. You would learn to be a spy of sorts yourself, wouldn’t you? To observe and keep information that might help you later.”

“Olga Levitch?” Quinn asked.

Tad nodded. “On the night of the opening, Willem was showing off the chest. He’d taken a few people down to look at it. Finally he took Cyrus Hutchinson down to see it, and he turned off the alarm and used his key to open the cabinet so Hutchinson could see all the security features. It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. But things like the … things like the chest made him kind of crazy. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t thinking.”

“Hutchinson went up to his office to make a phone call. You showed him in,” Quinn said. “That’s when it happened, right?”

“Yeah. Willem remembered that he hadn’t locked the cabinet
back up. As I say, he wasn’t thinking straight. He was so consumed by the chest. So he went back downstairs and used the opportunity to look at it, alone. He picked up one of the stoppers to feel the alabaster. He had done this a hundred times, but he couldn’t resist. He’d put on a pair of cotton gloves. And then Olga was there. She was supposed to be patrolling the museum, looking for litter or helping the caterers.

“She told him that she’d seen me taking something out of the storage room one morning and that she didn’t want to go to the police, she just wanted to tell him.

“Willem thought she was trying to blackmail him. He said he panicked. He was holding the stopper and he just … he killed her. He said he was in a kind of dream as he did it. He looked down at the stopper, covered in blood, and it was as though someone else had done it and handed it to him. It was only later that he realized she wasn’t trying to blackmail him at all. She was afraid of the police. She was telling him for his own good.

“Anyway, Willem left the cabinet unlocked and used his penknife to make it look like someone had broken in. He took off the gloves, turned them inside out, stuffed them in his pocket, and covered the stopper with his trench coat. Then he went to meet Hutchinson.”

Quinn finished for him. “He walked Hutchinson out, turned his back to the security camera and bent over as if to tie his shoe, dropping the stopper into the garbage can. He knew it would be found. He knew all along that it would be found.”

“That was the thing that made me think of him,” Sweeney said. “If Willem had thought for a second that one of the stoppers had actually been stolen, he would have been beside himself. But he wasn’t. I remember how calm he seemed. It was because he knew where it was. He knew it was okay.”

“I didn’t know right away, of course,” Tad said. “It was after you asked me about the cabinet being unlocked. I realized that it must have been Willem. I came to talk to him. He was up on the fourth floor. There was no one around and I told him I thought he’d killed
Olga. I knew as soon as I saw his eyes. He told me all of this. He said it wasn’t his fault. He’d done what he had to do. I said I was going to have to tell someone. He swung at me. I’m not sure what he was thinking he was going to do. Perhaps he was going to kill me. I don’t know. He was desperate. I ducked and swung at him. I got him on the cheek and he was so mad, he kept swinging. I shoved him against the balcony, and he kind of leaned back over it, trying to get his breath, I think. And then he said that he would say I had killed Karen Philips and I had killed Olga and that I would go to prison for the rest of my life. I punched him again and again and he … he just went over. I must have got him under the chin because he kind of went up in the air and then he was gone.

“He didn’t scream. I don’t know why he didn’t scream. Maybe he wanted to … I don’t know. But he didn’t scream. I knew there weren’t any security cameras out on the balconies, so I went back to my office and collected myself, combed my hair, changed out of the shirt I’d been wearing, and waited for someone to come tell me what had happened.”

Quinn stood up. Suddenly, he was so tired he could barely keep his balance. “I don’t understand why you were willing to cover up for him, why you didn’t go to the police when you realized what had happened. Where did your loyalty come from?”

Sweeney looked into his eyes, as though she was pleading with him not to ask the question. Tad said nothing, and finally Sweeney looked up at Quinn with her green, green eyes and said, “He loved him.”

Tad was crying again. “He could be … very kind. Sometimes. He could be very, very kind.”

“I’ll have to take you down so you can make a statement,” Quinn said. “But I think there’s an argument to be made that you struck out at Keane in self-defense. You may not even be charged.”

Tad Moran didn’t look relieved. He just looked sadly up at Quinn. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Quinn thought of the same words he’d said to Denny Keefe and he thought about how he
was
sorry, how he sometimes felt as though
he made things worse rather than better. He’d once had a dream in which he’d been invited into a room with perfect white carpeting. As he walked in, he realized that his shoes were covered with mud and he was tracking it in. He turned around, tried to go back, but everything he did only made it worse. He felt a little like that now.