Sticky Fingers (7 page)

“Sorry,” I said.

“No worries!” Tito cried, picking up the weapons and restacking them. He put the breastplate on top of one of the lockers. “These things haven’t had a scratch in three hundred years, so why would they break now? Come this way.”

“Be careful,” I muttered to Nooch.

“I am,” he whispered back. “There’s just too much stuff in here!”

Tito talked over the music as he led us through a maze of lockers. He pointed to some junk sitting on top of one of them. “Those are Peruvian death masks. And up there you’ll see a fine example of Aboringinal carving, see? And some feathered arrows over there, from Africa. It’s all cataloged, so don’t think anything’s lost. Exquisite, right?”

Nooch tried to be polite. “Real nice.”

To me, all the stuff looked like a big garage sale.

Eventually, Tito quit giving us the grand tour and marched to his office, which was maybe eight feet by eight feet, all of it packed with computers, racks of CDs, boxes of old-fashioned photographic slides, and a line of coffee cups standing on a shelf, each with a different Latin phrase printed on the side. A space heater hummed on the floor.

It took Nooch four seconds to kick over the space heater.

Tito leaped to upright it. “Oh, dear, oh, dear. Maybe this is the wrong place to be if we’re worried about maintaining positive energy. I do keep a few important pieces here for—”

Nooch shouldered a pot off a shelf, and I caught it in midair.

Tito let out an unsteady breath. “That’s third century BC.”

I handed the pot to him carefully. “I guess I should have left Nooch in the truck.”

“It’s okay,” Tito said, clearly lying. He placed the pot firmly on a different shelf, then opened a shallow desk drawer and began to rummage in the clutter there. “Where’s that leash you gave me? It was definitely the right idea for Lucy. I just couldn’t bring myself to use something that dug into her neck.”

“I know what you mean. I couldn’t use it on Rooney, either.”

“Here we go. One spiked collar. Sorry for not returning it sooner.”

“No problem.” Before he could launch into another lecture, I said, “Tito, I wonder if you know somebody I went to school with.”

Tito smiled and fixed me with his intent blue gaze. “I figured there was something else on your mind. Picking up a dog collar you wouldn’t use seemed like a flimsy excuse.”

I grinned, too. “I should have known you’d see through me.”

“Who do you want to know about?”

“A lady by the name of Clarice Crabtree.”

Surprise showed on his face. “Why do you want to know about her? Is it personal?”

“No.”

“Business?”

“I—”

“Or something to do with your uncle?”

I was almost too distracted to grab Nooch just as he was about to bump a priceless sculpture off Tito’s desk. But I managed. “My uncle?”

Tito’s smile broadened. “I’m a researcher, Roxy. When I met you, I did a little reading, and of course Carmine Abruzzo’s name popped up. Before we have an accident, why don’t we talk elsewhere? Nooch, would you like a cup of green tea? I guarantee positive results.”

“Uh—”

“You’ve got him buffaloed,” I said. “Yes, he’d like some tea.”

Tito led us back downstairs to an employee lounge. Concrete floor, folding table cluttered with magazines and coffee cups. Tito put Nooch safely into a folding chair and proceeded to pour hot water from a coffeemaker over a fragrant tea bag. “To answer your question, yes, Clarice Crabtree works for the museum. Not at this facility. She’s at the main branch, in the natural history collection. She works in megafauna, but I hear she’s on the road quite a bit. She lectures and still visits digs, I believe. She’s in great demand, probably because of her name.”

“Her dad is Professor Crabtree.”

“Yes, of course, darling. That’s enough of a credential to get her dozens of lecture offers every year. Her husband works for the museum, too, by the way. His expertise is mollusks.”

“He must be a thrill a minute.”

“Actually, they both do fascinating work. But that’s not why you’re here. What do you want to know about Clarice?”

“Just—I don’t know exactly. What’s megafauna?”

“Shall I show you?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s leave Nooch here. Our insurance is paid up, but I’m thinking we should do everything possible to protect world culture.”

With Nooch content to sniff the contents of his teacup, Tito took me back into another part of the huge warehouse, a section cordoned off with a chain-link fence and padlocks.

As we walked, I asked, “Do you know Clarice personally?”

“Not well. I met her a few times—at large functions. At those things, all academic types brag about their prestigious awards and their important speeches. She was right in the scrum of battling egos. Otherwise, though, she was very cool.”

“She was cool?”

“In the standoffish sense. I’ve observed that characteristic in many wealthy people. They keep their distance. They’re afraid, perhaps, that everybody’s after their money.”

“Clarice is wealthy?”

“I believe her husband came from an important family. And, of course, there must be money in Professor Crabtree’s account, right?”

Money was enough to explain why somebody might want to kidnap Clarice.

“Unfortunately,” Tito continued, “her father has lost his marbles, I hear. Clarice packed him off to an Alzheimer’s facility a few weeks ago. We heard all about it, through the grapevine. Are you going to the house sale? That’s your line of work, right? Buying and selling junk from houses?”

“Not junk. Architectural salvage,” I corrected.

“Sorry. I heard Clarice was selling off things from her father’s estate. Furniture and whatnot. Probably things from his collection. Could be worth a fortune.”

Anything worth a fortune interested me.

Tito stopped in front of some large items heaped untidily behind the chain-link fence. I peered at the dim shapes and finally realized I was looking at bones. Very large bones.

Tito said, “Andrew Carnegie started this museum with dinosaur bones, did you know that? Dinosaur bones were very exciting back then—a surefire way to draw the public into a museum. Later, this was the first dinosaur Leeford Crabtree ever dug up. He named all his finds, by the way. This one is Trixie. We usually cast the bones in plaster and display the casts in the museum, not the originals. The real things are too heavy, so we keep them here.”

“Wow. Those bones are huge.”

“Early paleontologists often couldn’t find the smaller parts of skeletons. The right technology didn’t exist back then, which is why there isn’t enough of Trixie to make a good display. Her skull was missing—probably washed away or carried off by scavenging carnivores, and skulls are what give dinosaur displays their personality.”

“But you keep Trixie anyway?”

“We could have sold her parts, I suppose. But selling to collectors is very bad form in our world.” Tito blew some dust off a label. “Professor Crabtree eventually left dinosaurs for later species, of course. Some of us have the opinion that he surrendered the field because other, younger scientists were more successful. In the middle part of his career, he found a full saber-toothed tiger in Siberia. You’ve probably seen that one at the museum. He called that specimen Fred. Fred makes a very good display.”

If I had seen Crabtree’s tiger, it hadn’t made much of an impression on me.

I said, “You mentioned Clarice is into something called megafauna. What’s that?”

“Technically, it’s an animal weighing more than a hundred pounds, anything from deer and kangaroos to humans or elephants. But Clarice specializes in Pleistocene megafauna—those giant animals from the last ice age. You know—aurochs and the
Elasmotherium
and so forth.”

“The
Elas—
what?”

“A kind of giant rhinoceros.” Tito strolled further along the chain-link enclosure, gesturing at the dusty lumps on the other side. “And, of course, the granddaddy of the Pleistocene era—the woolly mammoth. Here are some mastodon bones.” He consulted a plain index card stuck on the chain link, lettered by hand in blue ink. “Shirley, I believe. Yes, it’s Shirley.”

“Can you make a lot of money stuyding megafauna?”

“Perhaps. Why don’t you ask Clarice? I’m sure she’d be forthcoming.”

“Hm.”

Tito had been observing me while he spoke. “You seem reluctant to communicate directly with Clarice.”

“A little. We have some history.”

Tito’s brows rose.

“Just a high school thing.”

“Ah,” said Tito. “High school. The great leveler. I hated high school.”

“Who didn’t?”

“Cheerleaders, probably.”

I laughed. “You’re right.”

“I think we should be getting back to Nooch, in case he’s destroyed something priceless. Is there anything else you’d like to know, Roxy?”

“Just this,” I said. “Do you know anybody who might have a beef with Clarice Crabtree?”

“That’s quite a loaded question, isn’t it? Is she in some kind of trouble?”

Yes, I thought. Clarice is in big trouble. I decided I better warn her.

6

But after visiting Tito, I took a phone call from a demolition guy who wanted me to take a look at a staircase in an old house he was tearing down in Millvale. Since business was so bad, I figured I’d better check it out. In my line of work, you never know when you might hit the jackpot. The staircase turned out to be junk, but at the home next door was a punk who wanted rid of his dead grandmother’s household stuff. In the heap of rubble he’d piled in the backyard I found what looked like a Russian icon.

It was a painting on a big splintered board, depicting a hollow-cheeked Christ figure with spaniel eyes and a starburst crown. I hauled the heavy painting out of the pile and sat down on the back steps to admire it. Things don’t often take my breath away, but this was a masterpiece. And, judging by its size, it might once have adorned one of the local Russian Orthodox churches.

A lot of immigrants had come to Pittsburgh a century ago to work in the mills, and some of them brought priceless heirlooms from their countries of origin. Especially religious stuff. The old folks were still the keepers of their ethnic traditions, but their offspring were often impatient with the old ways.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” The punk blew a lungful of cigarette smoke at the painting. “Gram collected all kinds of crap. Is this worth anything?”

“It’s not in great condition.” I balanced it awkwardly to point out the faded gold paint and the big scrawl of Crayola crayon across Jesus’s face.

“Give me fifty bucks and it’s yours,” the kid said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out on the porch floor. “If I don’t have to do any work, that is. Your moron can carry it out of here.”

Most of the time, I try to do the right thing by people who are scraping by. But I talked Prince Charming down to thirty bucks.

I drove the icon over to a gallery owner, who fell to his knees when he saw it. Later, he brewed us some espresso, and we talked over the wisdom of getting someone to restore it or just send the icon to an art auction house and hope for the best. He warned that it would take months—maybe a year or more—to get any definitive answers. I trusted the gallery owner. With luck, it might help start Sage’s college fund. Or not. I was out just thirty bucks. Not a bad bet.

After that pleasant interlude, I had to go back to my office to return some calls from people looking for architectural stuff for their houses. While I did that, Nooch moved stuff in the warehouse. I did my best to drum up some good business, but nothing panned out. I decided to take the advice from Nooch’s book, though, and think positively. Tomorrow was another day.

So it was a few hours later when we piled into the truck. The cold rain had finally let up, and evening was just starting to gather. I’d looked the Crabtree name up in the property tax rolls and found Professor Crabtree’s address, but not Clarice’s. I drove up to the neighborhood and parked in front of the Crabtree house.

Why? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t owe Clarice a damn thing. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to warn her that something was up.

Nooch and Rooney and I sat in front of a dark, sagging house in a once-respected part of town. Old age was getting its claws into the sidewalks and the homes. The location—near enough to the universities—had caused their value as single-family residences to drop like a block of yellow ice from an airplane.

I’d expected Professor Leeford Crabtree to live in grandeur. I mean, if he was such a big deal in the dinosaur game, he ought to have a few bucks, right? But instead, the house was practically a pile of sticks. Most of the Victorian houses in his neighborhood had been broken up into apartments for students. A few mildewed sofas sat on porches with beer cans scattered around—sure signs of student living. The brick street was nothing but bumps and potholes, and piles of wet leaves hugged the curbs. Half the trees were dead, just waiting to fall on a car and make some insurance agent miserable.

“Pretty house.” Nooch looked at the tilted porch and the broken stairs, but even he saw the obvious signs of past glory—the Victorian trim, the elegant proportions and scale the architect had put to use. “At least, it used to be. Who lives here?”

“Professor Crabtree.”

“Who’s that?”

“An old guy. He’s gone to a hospital.”

Nooch’s eyes bugged out. “He get hurt or something?”

Nooch might have been the size of a sumo wrestler, and he could scare the shit out of most petty criminals, but he had the personality of a lamb. Okay, maybe a lamb with a learning disability.

“His brain got hurt gradually.” I shut off the truck’s engine. “He couldn’t take care of himself anymore, so his family found a safe place for him.”

“You mean the old-folks home. Man, that stinks.”

In our final moments together, Tito had mentioned that Clarice decided it was time to do something about her father when Professor Crabtree took to spending most of his days and nights sitting on his front porch with a sawed-off Holland & Holland elephant gun. Neighbors became alarmed for their children. So his daughter, Tito said, finally clapped him into a nursing home.