Still As Death (9 page)

Sweeney read on. There were some nice comments about Karen from friends and fellow members of something called the Women’s Arts Collective. As far as Sweeney knew, the organization no longer existed, but the article told her that WAC published a monthly women’s arts magazine and Karen had been one of the editors. There was one quote that interested Sweeney, from another
WAC
editor with the improbable and wonderful name of Sharonna McClure. “Nobody really understands the pressures women face here,” Sharonna McClure had offered. “Karen was a victim of a corrupt and unequal system.”

Beyond that, there wasn’t much more. Karen’s parents had come from Greenfield to get their daughter’s body, and a memorial service was scheduled in her hometown in a week’s time. There was the de rigueur statement about the pressures of college and living on one’s own, and health services stated that any student who needed counseling should drop by or call the number below.

Sweeney wrote down all of the names included in the article. She was closing the binder containing the 1980 editions when she caught sight of a newspaper headline from the November before Karen’s death. “Art Heist at University Museum.”

Sweeney read on. “Unknown thieves carried out a daring daylight heist of valuable Egyptian antiquities from the Hapner Museum. Authorities say the theft may be the most significant in the history of the university.” Sweeney knew there had been a major theft at the Hapner in the late seventies or early eighties, but she had forgotten the details.

“The thieves posed as museumgoers,” the article continued, “and managed to subdue a museum security guard and Karen Philips, a student intern who was working at the museum, and to remove the items from displays during a time when the museum was quiet and nearly empty because of a weekly meeting of staff members.
Among the stolen artifacts are important relics of the eighteenth dynasty, though the museum’s most recent acquisition, a gold funerary mask that is perhaps the Hapner’s most valuable antiquity, was safe in a storage vault at the time of the robbery. Dr. Willem Keane, curator of Egyptian antiquities for the Hapner Museum, said that the recent exhibit of artifacts from the tomb of King Tutankhamen has raised interest in Egyptian artifacts and perhaps led to the theft.”

Sweeney looked for other references to the theft and found a few subsequent articles that confirmed what she remembered of the case, that the pieces had never been recovered and the thieves never caught, but that police believed the heist had been carried out by professional thieves, possibly working for figures connected to organized crime in Boston.

Sweeney felt a familiar little buzz of excitement. So Karen Philips had been working at the museum during the heist and had been tied up by the thieves. She seemed to have been the last person to see the falcon collar. And then she had hanged herself a few months later.

Slow down
, she told herself. One thing doesn’t necessarily have to do with the other. She would have to find out a lot more about the robbery, about Karen Philips’s death. And the collar might show up at any moment. Tad had said that it was probably just misplaced.

Sweeney had been so pleased when she’d been named a Lorcan Fellow. It had been very prestigious and she assumed had been a much sought-after prize in Karen’s time as well.

There probably wasn’t anything in it, but it couldn’t hurt to get a little more information. And there was one person she knew who could get her the police reports from the robbery and Karen’s death.

She could ask Quinn to look into it.

Back at the museum, she gathered her things together and was heading toward the main entrance to her car when Tad came up
the stairs, carrying the dark leather briefcase he seemed to take everywhere.

“Hi, Tad,” she called out. “Are you heading home?”

“Yeah. Though I have to say, the idea of leaving the air-conditioning here doesn’t sound very attractive right now.” He smiled, then looked shyly down at the ground.

“I know what you mean.” They waved good night to Denny and walked out into the furnace of the late afternoon. Students walking by them on the yard seemed to be moving in slow motion, trying not to exert themselves too much. Even the rush-hour traffic seemed languorous and sludgy.

“Hey, Tad, can I ask you something?” Sweeney said suddenly. “You were working at the museum in 1979, when there was that big heist of all of the Egyptian pieces, right?”

He nodded. “I was a grad student, but I was working part-time for Willem. Why?”

“What happened? A student was asking me about it today and I realized I didn’t really know the details.”

“I wasn’t at the museum. We were having a staff meeting off-site, but I guess these guys came in and posed as members of the public. They pulled guns on Denny, tied him up, roughed him up a bit, and then took their time breaking into the display cabinets. The cabinets weren’t alarmed in those days. The whole thing took about a half hour. When we all came back from the meeting, we found Denny and called the police.”

“Denny? Was he okay?”

“He was in the hospital for a bit. I’ve always thought that’s why Willem keeps him on. Denny had some troubles after the thefts. Took him a while to get back on his feet, and his wife left him. I think Willem feels guilty about what happened. Though he’s been talking recently about firing him. He said, ‘God forbid someone tries to break in.’ ” He looked panicked all of a sudden. “Don’t repeat that.”

“No, I won’t. There was a student intern who was there too, right?”

Tad looked up. “Yeah. Karen. She was working in one of the study rooms and she’d left the door open. They didn’t hurt her the way they hurt Denny, but they tied her up and she was pretty scared. She …” He stopped and left whatever else he’d been about to say unsaid.

“She had done some research on the collar, right?” Sweeney wanted to see what he would say.

“I have no idea.” His voice was neutral. “That was a long time ago.”

“The pieces have never been recovered?”

“From the heist? Nope. The university hired a private detective a few years ago, and we got some information indicating that it was connected to organized crime. Maybe the same guys that did the Gardner.” The 1990 theft of more than $250 million worth of paintings, among them famous pieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was the largest art heist in history. Sweeney had been in college then, and she remembered what a huge story it had been in Boston.

The Gardner heist had been carried out by two men wearing Boston Police uniforms who had convinced security guards to open up the museum. Sweeney knew that it had long been rumored that the Gardner heist was the work of mobsters with links to the IRA, but the FBI had never found anything definitive and no one had ever seen the paintings again.

“Did anyone around the museum have any theories about who it was?”

“Not really. For a while, the police seemed to think that someone inside the museum had tipped them off, because they pulled it off during the staff meeting, but then it came out that quite a few people outside the museum knew about the meeting too, so I think they let that go.” He started to edge away from her. “My car’s over there so I’ll just …”

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” She had a sudden urge to ask him whether he had known Karen Philips well, but instead she watched him go
and decided that there was something about Tad that made you feel sorry for him. He was too eager to please, somehow, too willing to put aside his own needs for everyone else. She wondered if Fred was right about the sick wife at home, and she wondered if that was why he’d given up on his own academic career.

But then she thought about how her own choices might look to someone who didn’t know what she had been through. We really are mysteries to each other, she thought. We really are.

DENNY KEEFE FLIPPED the long row of switches controlling the lights in the basement galleries and watched as the fluorescent bulbs flickered and then died, leaving everything in darkness except for the small lights on the security cameras, telling him that they were on duty, ready to catch a thief if that thief tried to come into his museum and take something.

When his girls were little, they’d loved a book about a boy who got flattened in some kind of accident and then volunteered to hide inside a painting in a museum to catch a thief who was stealing the museum’s art. He thought of the cameras that way. It was like he could be there, watching and waiting to make sure nothing happened to the museum he’d come to think of as his own home. It was his mission, his burden, to protect what was in these walls at any cost. He was going to do whatever he had to do to make sure nothing happened, ever again, to any of these beautiful things.

He moved up to the third floor, taking a moment to look at a row of framed photographs leaning against a wall. This was where the red-haired girl was putting on her show. He looked at a black-and-white photograph of a little girl lying on a bed and staring up at the ceiling. Another one showed an older woman lying in her coffin.

They were photos of dead people—he’d figured out that much from the title of the show. He studied a few more, moving into the next gallery, where the walls were covered with photographs of gravestones. He’d always liked gravestones, personally, and when he and April had been together, they’d sometimes gone and walked around in the cemeteries out near her mother’s house in Waltham. It had given April the creeps sometimes, but he liked reading the names on the stones.

Sometimes he could relate to the people in those photographs, he thought. Sometimes he felt like he looked alive, but was really dead inside.

He’d felt that way ever since April had left. Dead inside. A few times, the girls had asked him why he didn’t want to date anybody, why he didn’t go to places where he might meet a nice woman his age, have someone to cook for him again, someone to love. And what he told them was that he was okay on his own, that he liked living by himself. But the truth was that he didn’t think he had enough inside for a woman. He didn’t think he had anything left.

He hit the lights on the third floor. He went down to the second floor and got the lights there too, then made his way back to the main floor and started the closing procedure, setting the alarms and methodically checking every gallery, every restroom, every place someone could hide. Someone had hidden in the men’s room once. Maybe fifteen years ago. He’d waited until everyone was gone, then taken his time cutting a painting out of its frame. He’d been caught on his way out, though, when he’d tripped one of the silent alarms by the main entrance.

In the almost thirty years he’d been working as a security guard, Denny had seen a lot of changes in the way they did things around here. When he’d first been here, the security had consisted mostly of the people who watched over the museum’s works of art. He and the other security guards had been just about the only line of defense—aside from the locks on the doors and the alarm system—and they had stopped a lot of attempted crimes. Not the big thefts, necessarily,
but other stuff, college kids trying to draw graffiti on paintings, a few minor thefts of small pieces.

All that had changed in 1979, of course. Denny went down to do a final sweep of the basement and stood for a minute in the darkness, listening to the hum and rattles of the machines under the museum, the furnaces and water heaters and everything. And he thought about lying on the cold stone floor that day in November, tied up, injured from the beating the men had given him, waiting for someone to come back and find him. For some reason, those memories had been coming back with more frequency lately, the way the ropes had burned against his skin until his wrist had gone numb. He remembered the way it had hurt to breathe, because of his broken ribs, and the way he kept looking down to find blood running from his broken nose. Only he hadn’t known it was from his nose and he’d wondered if it was coming from his mouth, if he was dying. That’s what always happened before people died in films, wasn’t it? Blood came out of their mouth.

It was strange, the memories coming back now, after all this time. Over the last few weeks, as he’d been walking around the museum, things had come back to him, the way the thieves’ voices had sounded, the jacket one of them had worn, with a tear at the elbow. What had the guy been thinking, trying to pass himself off as a regular museumgoer, with that big tear on his elbow? Denny hadn’t noticed it that day. It was only later that it seemed burned on his brain.

When he was finished doing the evening security procedures, he entered his name in the logbook and handed it to David, the guy who was on overnight. They didn’t have him work nights anymore, and he found he kind of missed it. There was something about being all alone in the museum, with no one else there, that made you feel like maybe it was yours. He used to wander slowly through the rooms, thinking to himself that he was lord of a big estate, that he was showing off his paintings. His father had told him that the Keefes had once been kings of Ireland, and as a child, Denny had dreamed of going back to claim his castle, to restore the Keefes to
their rightful place on the throne. He remembered being bitterly disappointed when some other kid had told him Ireland didn’t have kings and queens anymore.

“You okay?” David asked him, writing his own name in the book and tucking it beneath the desk.

“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking about something.”

“Okay. Have a good night.”

“Yeah. You too. Hey, keep an extra eye out tonight. There was a weird guy in here before, dressed in this long coat. He didn’t have anything on him, but it just seemed kind of strange, being so hot and all.”

David nodded, looking at Denny as though he was a little bit crazy. The new guys trusted the machines, the alarms and buzzers and motion detectors and all, to the point that they sometimes forgot they were guards and not damn secretaries. Ah, well, there wasn’t a lot he could do.

It was still hot when he came out into the evening, and he stood for a moment breathing the thick, not-very-fresh air. A pretty girl in a tank top walked by, and Denny watched her breasts bounce under the pink fabric without feeling much of anything. He was numb. About the museum, about his children, about everything. He got up every day and did what he had to do to get himself through to the evening, when he could go home and have a drink and fall asleep in his chair listening to sports radio. But he didn’t have emotions anymore, he decided. And it wasn’t just since April’d left that he’d felt this way. It was since that day when the museum had been robbed, when, lying on the cold floor wondering if he was going to die, he’d thought he’d lost a little bit of his soul. As it turned out, he’d lost it all.