Privy to the Dead (18 page)

“Did you? Impress him, I mean?” Marty asked.

“Maybe. It's too late to ask him now.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don't be. I know a lot more about your family than you do about mine, so it seems only fair to tell you a little about mine. But that's why I know about firearms. I certainly had never anticipated that the knowledge would come in handy years later.”

I sat up straighter. “Let me think about the idea of an old crime, okay? We've got enough going on already, and maybe that will shed some light. Lissa and Shelby are tracking the donor families, and we know Lissa's a good researcher. Okay, maybe she won't be able to get certified copies of birth certificates and the like, but there are other ways of following kinship that are public. Wills. Property transfers. Newspaper articles, especially obituaries, which tell us a lot about family connections, as I don't need to tell you. I'll bet Lissa can have a rough cut by tomorrow.”

“That works for me,” Marty said firmly. “But keep thinking about the other thing.”

As if I had a choice.

Once back at my desk, I called Lissa on her cell phone. She answered quickly.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At the library, and I've got a class at three. Why?”

“Have you made any progress on tracing the families of those former board members I e-mailed you?”

“Some. When do you need it?”

“Soonest. Look, I know it's asking a lot, but could you have this roughed out by tomorrow morning? It's important, otherwise I wouldn't ask.”

“Sure, I'll just give up sleeping. Seriously, I did make a good start, so I can definitely finish extracting what I can from public records and give you that in the morning.” She hesitated. “It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what you want to find.”

Should I tell her to stick to only those families who have living descendants? I decided not to. “I don't want to bias
you. If there's any question about what to follow, concentrate on descendants who stayed around Philadelphia. If they headed for California, put them on the back burner. Does that make your job easier?”

“Much. You want, uh, legal proof?”

“No, just the general descendant tree will be fine. Oh, and if you get done early, e-mail the results to my personal account, okay?”

“You really must want this! Will do.”

“Great. See you tomorrow.”

One more thing checked off my list. I thought for a moment, then decided to call the bank, the same one the Society had used for the last hundred and whatever years. After five minutes of explaining who I was and what I wanted, I finally reached a knowledgeable human. “Hello, Ms.—uh, what was your name?”

“Esposito. What can I do for you?”

I explain my bona fides once again and could hear the woman tapping at her keyboard, no doubt calling up the Society's information. “Yes, I see your account. Everything appears to be in order. Are you concerned about a particular transaction?”

“I'd like to know about whatever transactions took place between, say, 1900 and 1907.”

That startled her into silence. Then she chuckled. “Well, I can tell you that our records go back to the founding of the bank in 1853 but are not part of our electronic database. Let me check with my superior and find out where and how they might have been archived. Can you hold?”

“I will.”

I listened to canned music as I made yet another list on a
pad in front of me. At least some items were inching their way forward, although I couldn't claim that anything had been resolved on any of them. I wondered idly how many bank ledgers we held at the Society, for banks that had ceased to exist decades or even centuries before? Philadelphia boasted an impressive history in the banking sphere, starting with the first bank in the country. While I waited for the people at the modern bank to get back to me, I noodled around our Society database to see what records we actually possessed, and was pleasantly surprised by the scope—but “our” bank was not among them. I sighed and resumed waiting.

Finally someone came back on the line, a man who introduced himself as Jacob Keefe, the Society's account manager. We went through the whole “who are you” rigmarole again, until he finally accepted who I was and that I had a right to the information. “Thank you, Ms. Pratt. I know the process is tedious, but I'm sure you understand and appreciate the lengths we must go to, to protect the integrity of our clients' accounts.”

“Oh, I do, believe me. But all I wanted was a simple answer: Do you have the records for the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society for the first decade of the twentieth century, and can I see them?”

“The answer to both questions is yes, but they remain in paper form—they have not been digitized, largely because there has been little call to do so, and they are presently stored in a remote warehouse. I can order them up for you to be here sometime next week.”

I didn't want to wait, but did I have a choice? I summoned up my chief-executive-but-really-nice-lady voice and said
sweetly, “Is there any possible way you could get them any more quickly? I hate to bother you, but it's really important.” I lowered my voice. “There's a police investigation involved.” Not exactly a falsehood, was it? When he started sputtering, I hurried to say, “Oh, it's nothing that your bank has done. In fact, I'm hoping that your records will help us establish someone's innocence.” I hoped he wasn't going to ask me how a bank record from that early era was going to make that happen.

He didn't. “Well, of course we'll do whatever we can to expedite their retrieval. After all, you're one of our oldest and most respected clients. I'll make a few calls, and if we're very lucky, they could be in Philadelphia by, say, tomorrow afternoon? Will that be satisfactory?”

“Oh, yes, more than satisfactory. I can't thank you enough, and I'll be sure you get the recognition you deserve for assisting in this matter. Please call me when you know when they'll arrive. And I hope you'll take the time to visit the Society—we have some wonderful original documents here pertaining to the early history of banking in Philadelphia, and I'm sure you'd be interested.” I was laying it on with a trowel.

“I, er, um—that sounds delightful. I'll be in touch.” He hung up, and I sat in my seat, smiling at how my silly, sexist strategy had gotten me what I wanted.

Would the bank records show any unlikely inflows of cash? It might be instructive to compare the bank's details of the cash flow in the construction account with Shelby's contributions records. Or it might yield another big fat goose egg. Still, I could cross one more thing off my list.

There were no further revelations that afternoon. James
picked me up at five thirty. I let him navigate Philadelphia rush-hour traffic before I said, “May we have a hypothetical conversation?”

“You mean a conversation about something hypothetical. Certainly.”

“Excellent. Say, hypothetically, that we may have knowledge of an old crime, and all the parties involved are long dead, so they don't care. And say we have a new crime, which may or may not be related. And we think it is possible that we have a weapon that may link the two. Except that we don't actually ‘have' it, but we think it exists. What should we do with this hypothetical information about the hypothetical crime or crimes?” I ended sweetly.

James's mouth twitched as he tried not to smile. “Could you be more oblique if you tried? More to the point, does this involve anything confidential or proprietary?”

“Not right now, as far as I know.”

He sighed. “You've found something more about this recent death, haven't you?”

No wonder James made such a good agent: he could read between the lines. “Marty and I think so. But we have little hard evidence.”

“Then go ahead and tell me what it is you're thinking.”

I presented him with Henry's new information about the gunpowder residue, and added my discovery of the cartridges in the pit, which I thought established the existence of a weapon—a specific weapon whose current whereabouts were unknown. I laid out our theory about the removal of the hypothetical weapon from the Society, Carnell Scruggs's putative possession of it (if briefly), and the alternate scenarios for its seizure, which had resulted in his death. I
pointed out which details I had given the police, and which I hadn't. And then I sat back, shut up, and let James mull it over for a few miles.

His first comment was, “The recent death—the only one the police care about—could be no more than a string of coincidences.”

“We acknowledge that, which is why I haven't gone back to them with this. I really don't want the Philadelphia Police Department to see me as a crazy lady who keeps bothering them with wild theories.”

“So what were you planning to do next?”

“I'm holding another meeting with the inner circle of staff members tomorrow morning, where we will pool the results of our latest research. Marty and I have agreed that if we don't turn up something of substance, we'll cut it off. It's not right to waste the Society's time chasing wild geese.”

“Will Martha let it go?” James asked.

“I . . . don't know. You know how she feels about her family, and this hits kind of close to home.”

“I know. She was close to her father—he was a good man, and so was his father, based on all I've heard. I'm sure she doesn't want to see his memory tarnished by finding that he was involved in a serious crime or a cover-up.”

“You have any suggestions?”

“Off the top of my head, only one: Have you tried contacting any gun collectors?”

That hadn't occurred to me. “No, but it's a great idea. You know any?”

“I might,” James said. “Let me make a call tomorrow.”

A collector might know who'd be interested in that kind
of antique weapon
, I thought.
Or who might buy one, if it turned up on the street. But then again, it might not be relevant.

“You're familiar with that weapon, right?” James asked.

“I've never handled one, but I've seen pictures. Why?”

“Because to someone like Carnell, it would look a lot like a modern weapon,” he told me. “I doubt that an unskilled laborer would look at it and say, ‘Ah, a rare and valuable antique!' He'd be more likely to think, ‘Bet I could get some quick cash if I can find a buyer.' Right?”

“Good point, James,” I said. “Although whoever took it might still go to a dealer, if
he
recognized it for what it was, so it's worth looking into local dealers. Can I ask, would it be valuable enough to kill for?”

“It may be rare, but it's not that important,” James said.

That was what I had thought, but it was nice to have confirmation. “Which brings me back around to our hypothetical crime. Carnell found it by accident and took it because he thought he could sell it, but whoever stole it from him more likely wanted it to disappear again, for reasons not connected to its value. Otherwise, why would he have taken the escutcheon, too? You think our story hangs together?”

“It's possible, even if it's a stretch. You're going at this in the right way: you and your staff are looking at the earlier event, assuming it exists, where you have details that no one else would. What happened then may or not be related to what happened last week, but that's not your business. Let the police handle that.”

“And that's exactly what I told Marty. But we could be helping by providing a motive.”

“And Martha accepted that?”

“I think so. For now. She kind of defines her own boundaries, doesn't she?”

“She is a force to be reckoned with,” James said solemnly.

I allowed myself a small giggle, and then we lapsed into a comfortable silence. I felt like I'd cleared one hurdle in working out the ebb and flow of our relationship

I really hoped my Society staff and Marty and I either caught a break with our research efforts or ran into an insurmountable brick wall, because I was getting heartily sick of devoting so much of my time and energy to figuring this out, not to mention that of a large portion of my administrative staff. Was Detective Hrivnak good at her job? Reasonably. Would she solve this one? I had no idea. Last time we'd talked, at the beginning of the week, she'd been all but clueless—and I meant that literally. We'd handed her the information about the escutcheon, which unfortunately tied some part of the event to the Society, but the man in the blurry bar video who had shown interest in it could have been practically anybody. At least any slim, white, able-bodied thirtysomething male. Which narrowed it down to a few thousand people in Philadelphia.

But which one of those people had a motive to kill Carnell Scruggs? Was I relying too much on motive? Was it as simple as a mugging gone wrong? Not that Mr. Scruggs had looked like he had much on him, but maybe he'd flashed his wages at the bar. How much money was worth mugging someone for? Was there a minimum, or did it depend on how desperate you were?

“Were you going to get out of the car?” James's voice broke into my racing thoughts.

I looked up to find we were parked in our own driveway. “Oh, are we home already? I was trying to work something out in my head.” I pulled myself together and gathered my things, then climbed out of the car. He already had the back door open when I reached it. “Thank you, kind sir,” I said as I brushed past him.

A short while later, I sat admiring James as he prepared dinner and I enjoyed a glass of wine. “Have you caught any new cases lately?” I asked. “I mean, that you can talk about?”

“Nothing major. I think I've told you before, usually each of us has between ten and thirty open cases at any one time, so there's plenty to keep us busy. Some drag on because we're waiting for one more piece of evidence, or a lab report—and you know how backed-up the labs are—or a piece of information from a different agency. Make haste slowly, as the saying goes. Not unlike your place.”

“I guess I have a different perspective, since we think in terms of centuries. Funny how we keep things because we believe they matter—that something someone did or said in 1823 would mean something to a researcher today. I can't believe I and my staff are trying to solve a killing that took place last week based on something that happened more than a century ago.”

“That does sound unlikely,” James replied amiably,

“And it's intriguing how perspectives on history, and which bits are important, keep changing.”

“Could you see yourself doing something else?” James asked as he chopped something.

“Like what? Academia? I think that boat sailed a while ago, and I'm not sorry. A corporate position? Politics? Or maybe I could become an antique dealer so we could finally
furnish this place at a cost we could afford?” I laughed. “Please don't tell me you're thinking of moving to Bora Bora and opening up a beachfront bar.”