Still As Death (31 page)

“No. I want to tell. You said it just like it happened,” he choked out. “They said they was just going to rough me up a little, just give me a black eye, something obvious so it would be believable. But they didn’t do that. They called me a piece of shit. They yelled at me. They started kicking me. I remember, lying on the ground while
they kicked me, and I screamed that I didn’t want them to kill me. They did their job well. I wasn’t going to say a word. They had me scared shitless. All these years, I’ve been waiting for those guys to come back and finish the job.”

Quinn sat back. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me how they came up with the idea.”

“I was telling the truth. My cousin Vinnie and me weren’t very close. I hardly ever saw him. But one day he came by my house and said he wanted to talk to me. He said he’d heard from our grandma that I was working at the museum. And he said he had some friends who were very interested in that information. It wouldn’t cost me much, he said, just the kind of stuff that you dropped to people sometimes at a barbecue. He said since I was the security guard, I would know when people came and went, how the security system worked, that kind of thing. All I had to do was tell them some of this stuff and they would give me a lot of money. It was more money than I make in a year of working, two years. I had a lot of bills, a mortgage that stretched me right to the limit, a couple of kids and another on the way. I knew what they were talking about. I knew that they were going to take something. But the way I thought about it was that the insurance was going to pay for it, anyway. I knew about the insurance guys. They came and asked me questions about our security procedures, about how many times I walk around the museum, stuff like that, and I remember that I asked one of the other guards what would happen if someone took something from the museum, and he said that the insurance would just pay them, sometimes more money than the thing was even worth.

“That’s when I decided. I figured out a day when I was on duty and there was a staff meeting. I figured that was the best way. No one would be around, there wouldn’t be a lot of visitors. It made sense to do it that way. I knew who they were when they came in. There was something about them, even if they were dressed in business suits. I nodded at them and they walked around the museum. The plan was that they would hit the silent alarm, just before they
left. I showed them where it was. But first they came up behind me and let me have it. That was that. It took me eight months to recover. I still have pain in my leg and I have a nightmare about it almost every night. What’s going to happen to me?”

“We’ll be asking for a plea,” the lawyer said hurriedly, trying to make the best of it. “Mr. Keefe is cooperating fully.”

“We’ll have to see,” Quinn said truthfully. “The FBI’ll get involved now. If you’re willing to testify about McMaster’s involvement, you may be able to cut a deal for no jail time. If you can help locate the stolen works of art, things may even be better for you.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“There’s witness protection.”

“Oh, hell. That’s no kind of life.” Keefe slumped even farther down in his seat and Quinn felt a pang of pity. But then he remembered Olga and Willem.

“What about the murders at the museum? You have anything to do with that?”

“The … What? No way. When Olga was killed I thought maybe it was McMaster’s guys again. Sometimes, after I got better and came back to work, the way she looked at me sometimes, it was like she knew. I’m serious. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

Quinn stood up, ready to go. He didn’t think there was anything in that. How would Olga have gotten in touch with McMaster? “Do you remember a girl who worked at the museum, back around the time of the theft? Karen Philips?”

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “A lot of students have worked here over the years. I can’t remember much about any of them.”

“She was tied up during the robbery.”

A horrified look came over Keefe’s face. “I swear to God I didn’t know she was going to be down there. They were all supposed to be up at the staff meeting. When I heard that there was a little girl down there, I almost told them. They didn’t hurt her, though. They didn’t hurt her like they hurt me.”

Quinn stood up. “Okay,” he said. “The FBI is going to have to
take over now.” And as he walked out of the room, he turned to look at Denny Keefe. “I’m sorry,” he said, not sure why he’d said it.

It was only as he walked out of the room that he realized Denny Keefe reminded him of his father. How had he not seen it? One of his mother’s cousins, visiting from Ireland and a real space shot, had once told him that she saw people as colors. Quinn for example, she’d said, was a combination of blue and red. Now he thought he knew what she meant. There had been a grayness about his da, a dark pit of sadness the color of smoke.

And when he looked at Denny Keefe, he saw the same bottomless grayness, the sense that his soul had died a long time ago, even if his body kept on going.

WHEN SHE DIDN’T FIND TAD in his office, Sweeney tried the museum. But he wasn’t anywhere to be found, and finally she decided to stop by Harriet’s desk before assuming that she’d missed him.

“Have you seen Tad?” she asked Harriet, who was tapping away at her computer with a manic intensity.

“He’s in storage,” Harriet said, then corrected herself. “He’s in the storage
area.”

“Thanks. I’m just going to go in and see if I can find him.”

“You want a key?”

“Well, you could just let me in.”

“Technically, anyone who wants to go into the storage area needs to sign out a key. That way, we know who’s been in there.”

“Everyone? Even Willem and Tad?”

Harriet nodded.

“Fine. I’ll sign out a key.” Sweeney signed Harriet’s paper and took the passkey from her. She waved it in front of the door, punched in her password, and walked into the main storage room. It was cool in here and she stood for a minute, enjoying the feel of the temperature- and humidity-controlled air on her skin.

“Tad?” she called out. “Are you here?”

There was nothing but silence in the huge room. Against one wall, she could see baskets piled between two of the mobile storage units. On one row of shelves was a series of Roman busts. The shelves were filled with beautiful things.

“Tad?” she called out again. It was a moment before she heard his footsteps. “Where are you?” There was something slightly eerie about him not talking to her when she knew that he was there. “It’s Sweeney. I just wanted to ask you something.”

But the large room was silent as she walked along the storage units, catching glimpses of vases and silver and ceramic ware.

She found him sitting on the floor next to a tall rack that held paintings from the European and American collections. When he looked up at her, she could see that he’d been crying, though he tried to hide it, smiling at her and standing up.

“Tad, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m just …” But he must have seen that she wasn’t going to let him avoid the subject of his tears. “It’s just … Willem.” He said it lightly, as if to say that everyone was missing Willem, weren’t they? “It’s been a hard couple of weeks.”

But when she looked at him, she saw something else entirely on his face. His eyes were haunted, bereft, the eyes of a despairing heartbroken lover.

“Tad? Were you …?” She couldn’t think why she hadn’t seen it. Neither Tad nor Willem had ever had relationships that she knew of. And it would explain why Tad had given up his own career to work with Willem so many years ago. “You were in love.”

Tad inclined his head. There was nothing else to say. “I’m sorry. Did you need something?”

She waited a beat. She wanted to say she was sorry, to reach out and console him, but instead she said, “I wanted to talk to you about the falcon collar. I think it was misidentified when it was given by Arthur Maloof in 1979. It looks like it may have been on purpose, to disguise the fact that it had been taken out of Egypt illegally. But I
think it’s actually much more valuable than anyone thought, and I think Karen Philips figured that out. I don’t know if it had anything to do with her death or not, but I’m just wondering how it happened. Wouldn’t someone have noticed the discrepancy between what the file said and the actual piece? I mean, you and Willem both knew Egyptian stuff really well, right?”

Tad looked warily at her. “Willem wasn’t particularly focused on the jewelry,” he said. “Maloof gave it at the same time as the gold mummy mask, and that was the piece he really wanted. The jewelry was just Maloof’s castoffs.”

“Willem loved that mask, didn’t he?” Sweeney said. “It’s beautiful. Of course he would. And he loved the canopic chest too. I remember catching him staring at it a couple of days before the opening. It was like it was a child.”

“He’d been courting Hutchinson for years,” Tad said. “It was a real coup to get it.”

Sweeney smiled. “He was so proud of it that night of the opening, showing it off to everyone.” He
had
been proud. She found herself remembering the way he’d looked as he asked guests to come down to the basement to see it. Like a proud papa. When she’d realized that the stopper was gone, she remembered that one of her first thoughts had been that Willem would be devastated.

“It was amazing, actually,” she said, thinking out loud. “I would have thought he would have been completely frantic, thinking that something had happened to the chest. But he wasn’t, he was …”

In the quiet, semidark room, she saw the look on Tad’s face. His eyes darted away in shame.

With a rising horror, Sweeney stared at him. “Wait, he didn’t think something had happened to the chest, did he? He can’t have, not Willem. If Willem had really thought that one of the stoppers from the chest had been stolen, he would have been freaking out. He would have been raging all over the place, demanding that they find it. But he wasn’t. He was perfectly calm.”

“Sweeney, this is … I need to go.” He tried to squeeze past her,
but she kept talking and he was obliged to hear the rest of what she had to say.

“Tad? Why did he … He knew it hadn’t been taken. How did he know that? He must have …” It dawned on her, and she saw Tad see that she knew. “Because he put it there himself, didn’t he? He knew where it was all along. But that means that he … that means that Willem killed Olga.”

Tad nodded very slowly. “It was an accident,” he said in an almost whisper. “It wasn’t like he planned on it.”

Sweeney stared at him. “But if he … If he killed Olga?” She stood up, wanting suddenly to run, to get away from him. His eyes told her everything she needed to know. “That means that you killed him.”

Tad stood too, taking her arm and pulling her toward him so he could look very deeply into her eyes, as though he was trying to find something there. “You’re right,” he said, gripping Sweeney’s arm so tightly she gasped. “You’re right. I did.”

IT WAS NEARLY FIVE by the time Quinn was ready to go home. He checked his cell phone, found a message from Sweeney, thought about trying her at the museum, and decided to wait until later. He was just about to leave when he saw the interview notes from the museum staff in his in-box. He’d wanted to double-check with Cyrus Hutchinson about the time he’d left the opening in order to pin down when he and Willem Keane had been walking down the stairs to the basement. He was wondering if maybe Keane had seen something that night, if he’d seen the person who’d killed Olga and therefore been a threat to that person.

He checked the notes, found Hutchinson’s assertion that he’d left at six-thirty. It was possible that Willem had seen something as they’d walked back upstairs. Of course Willem couldn’t tell Quinn that anymore, but Cyrus Hutchinson could. Perhaps it made sense to jog his memory a little.

He dialed the home number Hutchinson had given him and asked the woman who answered if he could speak to Mr. Hutchinson. He heard her call out, “Mr. Hutchinson. Telephone,” and then Hutchinson came on the phone and said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Hutchinson, this is Detective Tim Quinn in Cambridge.”

Hutchinson made a kind of snorting noise and Quinn could hear his fury across the phone lines. “Mr. Quinn, I was made to come back from my country house in the middle of the night, I was
subjected
to repeated questioning, as though I was a common criminal. I cannot imagine what motive you could possibly have for interrupting my dinner, but it had better be a good one.”

Quinn took a deep breath. “Mr. Hutchinson, I know you’re as eager as we are to find Willem Keane’s killer, and I was hoping that we could go over some of what you told me about the night of the opening. You said you and Keane went down to the basement to look at the chest at about six-fifteen, is that right?”

“That’s right. I wanted to see how he was keeping it. I was satisfied with the security, though of course as it turned out I shouldn’t have been.”

“So you looked at the chest, and then he walked you out at six-thirty?”

“Well, I’d gone upstairs to his office so I could make a phone call,” Hutchinson said. “I don’t believe in these cell phone things, you know. Think they’re silly. I made my call and then …”

“Wait a minute. You didn’t say anything about this phone call when we talked to you before.”

“Didn’t I? I thought I did. Didn’t Willem tell you?”

“No. So he stayed with you while you made the call?”

“No, that would have been rude. It was a private call. His assistant, Mr. Moran, showed me up to the office and waited for me while I made the call.”

“Where was Mr. Keane? Do you know where he went?” Quinn felt his pulse quicken. Keane could have seen whoever it was who had killed Olga Levitch. But if he had, why hadn’t he told the police? Was it possible he hadn’t realized until later what it was he had seen? If that was the case, maybe he’d mentioned it to the killer and maybe that was why he himself had been killed.

“No, I don’t. But when I was done, I met him out in the hall and
he escorted me to the front entrance. I walked out to the street and caught a cab to the train station.”

“Did he seem okay? He wasn’t upset about anything?”