Fundraising the Dead (29 page)

Marty reached for the machine, but James grabbed her hand. “You can’t mean there’s more?” He looked pained.

“Jimmy, if you could see your face. Yes, there’s more—his motive. Just listen.” She started the tape again. No fast-forward for Marty: she was going to make her unfortunate cousin listen to every sigh and squeaking bedspring. After a certain point, I found I couldn’t look him in the eye any longer, and made an in-depth study of the state of my cuticles. When I sneaked a peek at James’s face, it was an interesting shade of red, but he was still paying close attention. And when Charles launched into his grand scheme, his expression hardened.

The tape finally ended. Marty shut off the machine with a crisp snap, sat back in her chair, and looked at her cousin. “Well?”

I was beginning to appreciate the old-fashioned term
apoplectic
. Poor James looked as though he wanted to explode. He took a couple of deep breaths, without looking at either of us, before he attempted to speak.

“Martha Terwilliger, I don’t know whether to arrest you, strangle you, or kiss you. And you, Nell—I’m sure she dragged you into this, but you’re still an accomplice. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t know how many laws you’ve broken. We are not having this conversation. I am not here. Got it?”

Marty and I nodded meekly, avoiding looking at each other.

He wasn’t finished. “And I’m willing to bet Charles Worthington has broken a few laws we hadn’t even thought of. Wait until our lawyers get hold of this.”

He took a sip of coffee, then resumed in a calmer tone.

“All right, what does this nonexistent recording tell us? One, Charles has, or at least claims he has, substantial assets that we have not yet located. Two, we know why he has been amassing his little nest egg. Could he really do what he described?”

“I’ll take that one, Marty.” I decided it was time to stake my claim in this conversation. “I think the short answer is yes. I don’t know if you could put a dollar figure on it; a lot depends on whether he can acquire an existing building or needs to build one, what kinds of collections he wants to put together—just how big and ambitious his goals are. He’d need a lot of money—tens of millions. But the more money he brings to the table, or controls directly, the more control he’d have over the whole operation.”

James looked at me, bewildered. “But he’s already head of the place—isn’t that enough?”

I shook my head decisively. “Not for Charles—he’s thinking bigger. I’ve been giving it some thought, and I’m guessing that he figures he can make the Society’s reputation and its financial situation appear so compromised that if word of the thefts got out, he could swoop in and act as a savior—offer to absorb the collections, the library, maybe even the staff, into his new organization. Can’t you see it? He wouldn’t have to kowtow to a board or suck up to outside donors, or at least not as much. He’d tell the citizens of Philadelphia that he’s doing them a great favor, saving a big chunk of their heritage—when all the time he set them up just so he could feed his own ego.” I was working up a good head of steam.

“Mmph.” James didn’t offer any additional comments. “Tell me, whatever made you get Libby involved?”

Marty said promptly, “Luckily she’s his latest conquest—at least that’s what
he
thinks—and she was happy to help. But we figured he was acting according to pattern; he tends to use women, as Nell found out, for inside information, to make his job easier, and, yes, for money. He’s done it before. Nell talked to a couple of women who confirmed it, one way or another.”

James regarded me as though I were a specimen under a microscope. “Ah, yes, your colleagues in Boston and Washington.”

I grinned at him. “They both said pretty much the same thing. There were some thefts around the time Charles was at their institutions, as I’m sure you know. What they might not have told you is that he’d also charmed a number of strategic women and then dropped them when they were no longer useful to him. And he was very careful—he kept his thefts off the radar for a long time.”

James didn’t say anything. After a few moments, he stood up. “Well, you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

Marty was on her feet quickly, blocking his way to the door. “Oh, no, you don’t. We showed you ours, now you have to show us yours. You must have found something on the thefts, or you aren’t half the man you claim to be.”

James looked a bit smug. “Yes, Martha, we are about to close the jaws of the trap. That’s all I will say, but you can expect news shortly.”

She tried to outstare him, hoping for more specifics, but he had clammed up. He looked at me. “Nell, would you see me out, please?”

In the vestibule, his coat on, he turned to me and launched into a lecture. “Are you crazy? I know my cousin is a loose cannon, but I thought you might have enough common sense to at least stay on the right side of the law. What on earth were you thinking?”

I fought a fleeting impulse to apologize, and then I got mad. “Hey look, pal, this is my career, my credibility on the line. Unlike Marty, I don’t have a nice rich family to fall back on—I work for my living. The longer this drags on, the less marketable I become, especially if the Society sinks under me. And you all at the FBI have no imagination! You never would have stumbled on the way Charles uses women, not in a million years! And it was even worse than we thought!” I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes, and now I was mad at him
and
at myself. “Well, I’ve had enough. Sure, Marty and I bent a few laws, but we got the goods, didn’t we? We figured out the
why
for you—now all you need to do is work out the
how
and prove it.”

I stopped, since I had nothing left to say, and I was either going to spit at him or burst into tears. “So get out there and do it, damn you,” I ended feebly.

James stood perfectly still, staring at me. I had no clue what he was thinking. I knew what
I
was thinking: that I looked like a fool. He started to raise a hand, then dropped it. Finally he spoke.

“Nell, I’m sorry. You’re right. I hadn’t thought about how this affects you personally, and I can understand your frustration. But you have to look at it from my end, too: I need to build a case that will stand up in a court of law, that can’t be challenged, and you’re not making that any easier. I appreciate what you’ve done, but, please, can you two stay out of it from here on out? I promise, this will all be over soon.” For a moment he looked as though he wanted to say more but then apparently thought better of it. “I’ll be in touch.”

I closed the door slowly and walked back to Marty’s
living room. Marty looked critically at me and added, “You know, I think he likes you. Most people, he would have chewed their heads off. Yours is still attached. More coffee?”

“Great.” I refilled my cup. “Now what?”

“For once I think I’ll go along with Jimmy. We’ve given him all the information he could possibly want. Let him take care of it.”

I felt curiously deflated. Was that really how this was going to end? And hadn’t we lost sight of Alfred’s death, in all of our plotting and scheming? Neither the police nor James seemed to care about that.

I laughed bitterly. “You know, before this whole mess started, I never realized how much we all depend on the basic honesty of our patrons and staff. We’ve always assumed that they respected the collections, wanted to preserve them—not rip them off for their own selfish ends. I really feel betrayed, even apart from the job thing. Naive, wasn’t I?”

“I don’t think so.” Marty studied her own coffee, swirling the liquid around the cup. “Or even if you were, it doesn’t mean you were wrong. It does take a special kind of person to care more about something abstract, like history, than about their own needs. Hey, I’ve worked with you for years now, since long before Charles came on the scene, anyway. I’ve never known you to cut corners, to fudge anything—basically, to do anything that didn’t benefit the Society. I know you sure don’t do it for the money. I have to figure you do it because you
do
care. So, if you have to be a little naive, if you have to believe in the best of other people, then I guess it goes with the job. It’s a good thing, Nell.”

I was a bit stunned. I hadn’t known that she had paid me that much attention. “Marty—thank you. I don’t know what to say. I’ve just tried to do my job, and I really do love the place, and the people are great, and, yes, I really do feel it’s a privilege to handle some of the things I’ve had a chance to. And that’s why it makes me so mad that somebody like Charles—somebody in a position of power—doesn’t. But . . . I guess I never expected anybody else to notice. And I’ve got to say I misjudged you, and I’m very sorry.”

Marty laughed. “Yeah, I know, you thought I was a lightweight who just liked sticking her nose into things. It’s not the first time. Actually, you can hear a lot more that way.”

I laughed. “I’ll have to remember that. Well, then, what about this little FBI trap? Has James told you anything more about it? What’s the bait?”

“You remember that Bucks County collection that was left to the Society a couple of years ago? That guy who had a strange house museum, and who’d never changed anything in the place?”

I nodded. “Yes. I worked with the executors to see that there was enough money to catalog the materials.”

“But it hasn’t happened yet, right?”

“Right. They finished probate maybe a year ago and delivered the stuff to the Society, and we stuck it in storage boxes on the fourth floor until we could get to it. We were going to advertise for a student intern to work on it next semester.”

Marty cocked her head at me. “So nobody really knows what’s in all those boxes?”

“Not really. I looked at some of the stuff right after the man died, when it was still at his house, just to get an idea of the scope, how much space we’d need, things like that. It was a real hodgepodge—junk like his Aunt Minnie’s diaries, which talked mainly about the weather, mixed in with some really good items like detailed eighteenth-century records of the construction of the first house on the property, which architectural historians would love to get their hands on. I don’t think the man ever threw anything out, and he was the last of his family.”

“I’ve been through it,” Marty said.

I looked at her quizzically. “What? When?”

“Not at the Society. His sister was married to my aunt’s husband’s brother, so I spent some time at the house. Since he never married and never had children, and had this big place on the river, he used to hold family reunions every now and then when I was growing up. He loved to show us his treasures when we were kids, and I was one of the few who cared. And when I got to college, I asked if I could use some of his documents for my undergraduate thesis. Why do you think he ended up leaving all the stuff to the Society?”

“Marty, are you related to
everyone
in the five-county area?”

“Maybe half, or at least the families who’ve been around a couple of hundred years. Anyway, bottom line is I know what’s in the collections now at the Society. So I pointed Jimmy to a couple of real gems. Like some William Penn letters, and the original land grant for the old man’s property, signed by the founder himself.”

“Wow. I had no idea.”

“Thing is, I know who else was poking around the collections.”

The gears in my mind were grinding rather slowly. “You mean—Charles?”

“Yup. I ran into him up on the fourth floor recently—he was rummaging through the boxes. He gave me a nice song and dance about familiarizing himself with the collections, and I bought it at the time. I think we ended up having lunch together that day. Maybe he thought he could distract me with his charms.”

There was a little bell ringing somewhere in my head. William Penn . . . “Marty,” I said slowly, “when I was planting the bugs at Charles’s place, there was a deed on his desk signed by William Penn. I asked him about it, and he told me he’d picked it up at an auction in New York. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it sounds as though it could have come from that collection.”

“Would you recognize it if you saw it again?”

“I think so. You don’t get to handle original Penn documents that often. And I remember that the purchaser’s name on the deed was the same as one of our major donors.”

“That’s the one. So that would make two of us who would recognize it. Anyway, to get back to the FBI side—Jimmy’s been working with some of his colleagues in the New York office. They’ve got more people there who work with art thefts, dealers, collectors, and such—and besides, they’re somewhere that isn’t Philadelphia, which is good. They’ve got somebody working with them who’s put out the word that he wants an autograph piece from William Penn and is willing to pay big for it. All very low-key, word of mouth, that sort of thing.”

“That kind of stuff really goes on? And is it legal?”

“You really are an innocent, aren’t you? Of course it goes on, all the time. And there are various dealers who are willing to act as go-betweens without asking too many questions—for the right price, or finder’s fee. The FBI knows who they are, but they don’t usually hassle them, because they’re reasonably small fish, at least by their standards. We’re not talking about Rembrandts or Impressionists here, we’re talking about letters, diaries, little stuff. It’s a whole lot easier to trade in, especially below the radar. And, as we’ve already proved, a whole lot harder to identify and track. Anyway, our undercover collector in New York got a discreet message—from someone in Philadelphia.”

“No! You think Charles is selling that deed?”

“Already has. Charles moves fast. He knew you’d seen it, and he probably wanted to get it off his hands ASAP. The collector in New York will be watching for it, and he’ll let Jimmy know when it arrives.”

“He wouldn’t just stick it in the mail, would he?” I was worried about that poor, fragile, three-hundred-year-old piece of paper.