Fundraising the Dead (17 page)

“Your title is director of development. Is that correct?”

I nodded.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“I am responsible for raising funds to support the activities of the Society, through grants—government, foundation, corporate—and individual contributions. I also supervise the membership coordinator and the database manager. And I manage the public events, such as the gala. We hold a couple of major events each year, and a number of minor ones.”

“And you have been here how long?”

“Just about five years.”

“Who do you report to?”

“The president—oh, and the board, at least indirectly. If you look at our organizational chart, I’m below our vice presidents, but I
am
a department manager.” This whole thing felt weirder and weirder. I was playing a role in a play, pretending this was the first time I had said anything about this, much less met Agent Morrison. If I were really clueless, what would my next line be? “Am I allowed to ask any questions here?”

James looked at me directly. “You can ask. I’ll answer if I can.” He didn’t smile.

“Do you have reason to believe that there actually
are
things missing? That it’s not just our own confused filing system?”

He stared out the window behind me, mulling over my questions. At least, I hoped he was mulling them over. For all I could tell, he was doing the times tables or trying to remember if he’d picked up his dry cleaning—his face certainly didn’t reveal anything. Finally he spoke.

“I’d have to be more familiar with your internal workings to make a judgment about that. At this time, I am responding to a formal complaint from an interested party who appears to be credible.”

“What happens now?”

“I’ll speak with the staff, check for any criminal records among them, and review your collections management procedures. If I identify any items that are not where they should be, I would investigate beyond the confines of this institution.”

“You, or a whole herd of agents?” The idea of expanding the search made me nervous. I wondered whether I should say something about Rich’s disclosure to me about his past, or Marty’s disclosure about Alfred’s record, but I decided not to stir anything up. If he was a good agent, he’d already know about both, or would find out soon enough.

“Just me, for now. If I think I need help, I can call in others.”

An awful thought struck me. “Is this public information? I mean, do you have to announce that we are under investigation?”

He looked at me curiously. “Why?”

“Because it would make my job a whole lot harder. I’m supposed to be raising money, remember? People have to believe that we’re doing our jobs preserving their history—not letting it walk out under our noses or misplacing it.” I restrained myself from saying
losing it
.

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” he said. “Actually, until we determine that a theft has occurred, it isn’t actually news. We’ll just have to see.”

I gave him a weak smile. “I guess that will have to do, right? Anything else you need from me?”

He stood up. “Thank you, Ms. Pratt. You’ve been most helpful. Your president suggested that you could provide me with a staff list and perhaps a brief sketch of individual responsibilities—who has access to what, for instance.”

“Our VP of collections, Latoya Anderson, would have a better handle on that end of things.”

Imperturbably he said, “Mr. Worthington thought you might have a better overview of the institution as a whole, and what roles various staff members play.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but it was true. Since I wrote grants for all and any purposes, from building repairs to scanning equipment to staff salaries, I talked to almost everyone in the building on a regular basis, and I prowled the halls and the stacks. Far more than Charles ever did—he seldom ventured from his elegant office to mingle with the hoi polloi.

“Certainly. Will you be around for a bit longer? I can call up a staff list and add the sort of detail you might find useful. And do you need a tour of the building?”

“I would appreciate that. Why don’t you take care of that while I speak with the collections person?”

“Of course,” I said graciously. “I’ll have it ready when you finish with Latoya.”

He made a silent exit, and from the hurried scuffling outside my door I wondered just how many people had been listening to our conversation. But I had to assume that was Agent James’s intent—and that word of the investigation would spread throughout the building with lightning speed.

As soon as James left I swiveled in my chair and stared
at the computer screen. All right, first things first. I decided I needed to talk with Charles, so I stood up and marched purposefully to the president’s office. Doris was, as usual, standing, or rather sitting, guard.

“Is he in?” I said breezily, without breaking stride.

“No,” Doris replied with a small smirk. “He said he had a meeting to go to, and he won’t be back in the office today.”

Interesting. In his place, the first thing I would have done after an impromptu visit from an FBI agent would be to call an all-hands staff meeting and give them a clue as to what was going on, and ask them to cooperate fully. There was nothing worse than a lot of half truths and rumors floating around a small institution like ours, and it didn’t take much to poison the atmosphere. I wondered why Charles seemed to have beaten a hasty retreat instead.

“If he calls, will you tell him I need to speak to him?”

“Of course. I always give him his messages.” Doris turned away from me and resumed whatever it was she was typing. End of conversation, apparently.

“Thank you, Doris—I know you do.” I made my exit.

I went back to my office and put together a staff list as requested, cutting and pasting until each person had a paragraph or so describing his or her responsibilities, then added a copy of the organizational chart—who reported to whom, oversaw whom. I was just squaring up the stack when James reappeared in my doorway.

“Perfect timing!” I greeted him. “Here’s the material you wanted. Is there anyone else you were planning to talk to?”

“Not at this time. Let’s walk through the place. You can give me a sense of the layout.”

I stood up. “Fine. We can start at the top—we keep collections not accessible to the public on the third and fourth floors . . .” I kept up a running discussion as we walked to the elevator, got in, and I inserted my key in the fourth-floor slot. We stepped out on the top story. There were no lights on, but James laid a hand on my arm, and we stood still for a couple of seconds as he listened. No sounds of anyone moving around, either. It looked as though we were alone.

“Let’s start at one end and work our way back, and you can tell me what’s kept where,” he said.

“I’ll do what I can. As I’ve said, I’m not a collections person, so I have only a very general idea of how the collections are distributed. Let’s start in the back corner, over there.” I led him to the farthest point on the floor, a dim, dusty corner whose metal shelves were piled with large leather-bound ledger books from long-defunct companies. Then I lowered my voice. “Okay, do you really want the fifty-cent tour, or is there something else you want to talk about? Like why you’re here?”

He leaned back against the wall and broke a smile for the first time. “A little of each. I do want to scope the place out, get some idea of security and who has access to what. But I wanted to talk to you, too. You did well with that little charade downstairs—good reactions. Think everyone heard?”

“Thanks, and probably yes. I assumed that was your intention, when you left the door open. It’s a small place, and I’m sure those who weren’t eavesdropping in the hall will hear soon enough. So Marty got tired of waiting?”

“She told me she set a deadline and she’s sticking to it. By the way, your security sucks.”

I sighed. “I know. But there’s only so much money, and it doesn’t go very far. So we all pretend we don’t have a problem. But we do, don’t we?”

“Oh, yes.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers and waved it at me. “Alfred’s list.”

I nodded. “I bet he was surprised when he finally printed it out—when I first talked to him about it, I don’t think he anticipated the length of the list, or the nature of the items, as a whole. That’s probably why he sent a copy to Marty, too, in the first place.”

“He hadn’t communicated his concerns to anyone else? Before you, that is?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of, beyond his regular monthly reports to Latoya. Alfred was a very thorough person, and I’m sure he wanted to be certain that the items had not merely been shifted. And he was probably afraid he’d be blamed.” I wasn’t sure if Marty had told James about Alfred’s kleptomania—but if he was a cousin, he probably knew already. “I can’t say when he would have pressed for action on his own, until Marty complained and I came to him and asked him directly.” Did that mean that somehow Marty and I had pushed someone into killing him? I didn’t like that thought.

“Hmm. How would you characterize the items on this list?”

“Remember that this is not my area of expertise. There’s a little bit of everything here.
MSS
refers to manuscripts. Ephemera are things like advertising flyers, things that were originally made to be discarded. Some of these notations refer to condition or location. But I think you can see what kind of a mess the recording system has been. Alfred had made great strides in imposing order, but there’s still a long way to go.”

James said carefully, “This list goes on for pages, and even I recognize some of the names attached to items here. You’re aware of the cumulative dollar value of the missing items?”

“I did a little research when I first saw the list, but I’m not really sure. We don’t usually think in terms of market value for the collections we own. They’re irreplaceable, for one thing, because many items are unique.”

“Well, I had some of my people look at the list yesterday. They said more or less the same thing you did, but for the purposes of our files, they suggested a total of roughly five million dollars.”

So I’d been right, which didn’t make me happy. Hearing it from an FBI agent made it seem all the more real—and shocking. I still had trouble getting my mind around the concept. Somebody had walked off with several million dollars’ worth of items from our collections? How could that have happened?

James stared over my head at the piles of musty volumes. “Let me review the time line here. Marty came to you on the seventh. You spoke to Alfred that same day, and he set about preparing a list of items he believed to be missing. He left that list on your desk that night, but you didn’t find it until the next day. By then, he was dead. He’d also mailed a copy to Marty. Is that accurate?”

I nodded.

“All right. What took place next?”

“Alfred died, which was something of a distraction, to put it mildly. And then I went to Latoya and described what he had told me, and then I told Charles. He said he and Latoya would handle it. That was Monday. He and Marty met on Tuesday.”

“Do you have any idea why he did not report this possible theft of significant proportions to the managing board of this institution?”

“I imagine that he wanted to make sure of his facts first.”

“I find it hard to believe that an institution that is based on collections has such a shaky grasp of exactly where its collections are.”

“I hate to say it, but it’s not unusual. I mean, think about it—we’ve been acquiring or inheriting things for over a century. The Society has gone through a lot of changes—the original building we occupied was replaced around 1900, and then there were additions after that, and improvements. It’s an ongoing process. We’ve been trying to put the records for some of the easier materials online, so that both we and the public will have better access to them, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll be about thirty years before we’re finished. And of course by then the technology will have changed again, and whatever we’re doing right now will no doubt be obsolete.”

“That’s what Marty told me.” He still didn’t look convinced.

“I know it seems hard to believe that we could be so careless, but from what I’ve heard, it’s to be expected. Look, we’ve got literally millions of items in our collections, and we’re talking about a tiny percentage that aren’t where they should be. Let me ask you: if you had to find a single piece of paper in your house, one that you hadn’t looked at for, oh, five years, how easy would it be for you? Then multiply it by a factor of a million, and maybe you’ll see our problem.”

He smiled reluctantly. “Point taken. You know quite a bit about this.”

“I know the general outlines. I told you—I write grant proposals to fund this sort of thing. And I know what the competition is like among our peer institutions. There are a lot of us in the same boat.”

“You’re not making my job any easier. All right, let’s look at this from a different side. How do people get access to the collections?”

“Apart from staff, you mean? Well, we have members who pay for a varying number of on-site visits. But they don’t get to use the stacks—they have to request the documents they need, and a staff member brings the material to them, in the reading room. The same goes for researchers, who pay by the day. And there is a paper trail for that; we know who has requested which items, so if they go missing, we know who to ask. That is, if they play by the rules—and we all know there are some people who don’t. But there are also some board members like Marty who pretty much have free rein of the place and can go anywhere.”

“Do you have much of a theft problem, day to day?” James seemed genuinely interested.

“To a small extent, but I don’t think any of this comes anywhere near the scale we’re talking about. That almost has to be an insider, doesn’t it?” I stared at him bleakly.