Murder in a Good Cause (23 page)

“Call Volchek and find out,” said Sanders. “It's faster.”

“Mrs. Maria Figuerao,” said McNeill from his position a couple of desks away. “I interviewed her; 142 Palmerston Avenue. Same number as my sister's house in Oshawa, different street name. I noticed it at the time. She was the owner of the house where Walker spent the whole night playing cards when Mrs. Wilkinson was getting killed. And what do you want to bet that Volchek's other two witnesses are our disappearing Spaniards?”

“Basques,” said Dubinsky. “That's what Walker called them.”

“Basques?” said Sanders. “You didn't say they were Basques.”

“Volchek said it was all the same thing,” said Dubinsky. “It seemed easier to call them Spaniards. I mean, they are Spaniards, aren't they?”

“Sort of,” said Sanders, reaching for the phone.

Ten minutes later, the tired and irritated clerk behind the desk at Iberia Airways swore in exasperation as the same young police constable, looking considerably less lively this time, walked over to her. “Now what?” she said. The obligatory smile refused to emerge.

“We have some more information on those two men I was asking you about before.” She reached for a piece of paper, just in case. “The name of the second man is Carlos Ramirez.”

She ran her pencil down the passenger list rapidly. “No. No Carlos Ramirez.”

“And apparently these two men are Basque.” He said the word with a certain hesitation. “Does that make a difference? “

There was a long pause as she continued to stare at the list. Then she looked up at him and smiled very sweetly. “Constable, if you were looking for a Canadian named . . . oh, let's say John or Bill . . . and all you knew was that he was six feet tall, wouldn't it be helpful to find out he had purple hair and spoke only Swedish?”

It took a few seconds for the sarcasm to penetrate. The constable reddened.

“Yes, Constable, it makes a difference. A hell of a difference. I will inform security. They will be
very
interested.” As she reached for the phone, she smiled again. “And you can be damned sure his name isn't Carlos Ramirez, either.”

Are you certain of this?” Sanders asked. He was staring down at the piece of paper that Rob Lucas had just put in front of him.

“Yes, sir. I talked to three of the six people who were on duty in the public areas of the museum this afternoon. The guards didn't notice her, but the woman at the admissions desk certainly did. And so did the woman in the gift shop. She bought an expensive bronze medallion and paid for it in cash. Quite late in the afternoon. She was apparently waiting for a friend and kept looking out the windows of the shop for her. And according to the woman selling tickets, she wanted to know where the Greek and Roman collections were and asked her to direct her friend there when she came. But she didn't give a name. The description fits.”

“And no one saw her leave.”

“That's right. No one. It didn't strike them at the time, but they noticed it when I asked. The guards had done a check, chased one little girl out of the bat cave—kids always hang around the bat cave—but saw no one who fit the description of Miss von Hohenkammer loitering about.”

“Could she have gone out a back door?”

“Only with a key. Otherwise, she would have set off the alarms. When I asked if she could have slipped out when one of the staff were leaving, they admitted that it was possible. But not likely.”

Sanders stared down at the neatly written notes. “What do you know about the Basques, Constable?” he asked.

“The Basques?” said Lucas, momentarily startled. “Spanish or French Basques, sir?”

“Spanish. No, both.”

“A bit. They speak a non-Indo-European language which is very difficult for non-Basques to learn. And let's see, they've been fighting for their independence from France and Spain for centuries. And the Spaniards feel about the ETA—that's the Basque separatist organization—about the same way that Margaret Thatcher feels about the IRA. There are some excellent Basque restaurants in town if you're interested—Basque cooking is very good—and quite a few Basques emigrated from Spain to the American Southwest. What else did you want to know?”

“That'll do. Where in hell did you get all that from?”

“A history course I did. I wrote an essay on independence movements in the Iberian Peninsula. Want to know something about Catalonia?”

Sanders glared. “No thanks. Telephone the people at the museum and tell them we'll be there in ten minutes. Get a car, Constable. I'll meet you out in front.”

“Do you know exactly where she would have been in the museum? What sections?” asked Sanders into the telephone.

“Greek, I suppose,” said Harriet. “That was what she was interested in. Did she go to the museum?”

“Oh, she went, all right. And no one saw her leave. Which means there's an outside chance that she still might be there. I'm going to see if I can find her now.”

“I'll come with you,” said Harriet firmly. “I can help you search for her. And if she's there and hiding for some reason—my God, but that sounds bizarre, doesn't it?—she might come out if I'm there.” Harriet paused in wonder. “I never realized she was that squirrelly.”

“Squirrelly?”

“If she's hiding in the museum, she's squirrelly, let me tell you. Normal women don't do things like that. I'll meet you in front of the building.”

The crowd that met in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum looked small and insignificant, dwarfed by the shadowy heights of the totem pole that rose almost to the ceiling three floors above and by the curling staircases that surrounded it. Their feet echoed on the marble floor, and Harriet shivered. Power, primitive and menacing, seemed to emanate from the darkness around that great stolen symbol, and in spite of the imposing bulk of five police officers standing near her, she felt uneasy.

Sanders was in low-voiced conversation with the security guards and two additional administration people, while Harriet tried to avoid looking at the fierce totemic figures carved in wood beside her. She gasped, startled, at the sound of his voice in her ear. “We'll do the public areas with Mr. Arkwright here,” he said, nodding at one of the university students who work as guards during the night. “The rest of the guards and Collins and McNeill will do the areas that are closed to the public.” Two of the police officers walked over to the knot of museum security officials. “We'll start on the third floor. Lucas, you come with us, and you,” he said to the last two officers, “stay down here and make sure our pigeon doesn't fly out the front door unnoticed.”

Mr. Arkwright made an admirable guide. He took them carefully through every section of the third floor that a member of the public could possibly penetrate, accompanying the search with scandalous and funny tales of oddities he, or somebody, had encountered. Until Sanders told him rather coldly to keep quiet. “If she's here, which I doubt, there's no point in warning her that we're coming, is there?”

Harriet glared at him, and the party proceeded in silence. She would have infinitely preferred any kind of chat to this silent procession through the pale, glimmering figures of the past.

“Well,” said Mr. Arkwright as he peered around the last pedestal holding up the farthest statue, “if there's something alive up here bigger than a mouse, I'll turn in my badge. Let's try the second floor. More places to hide down there.” And the party stalked, ran, or clattered its way down the stairs.

The statues on the third floor were unsettling enough, but they were nothing compared to the cases of stuffed predators glaring dimly out at her in the natural history sections. She felt eyes boring into her back and hot breath brushing her neck as she followed along behind John, resisting the impulse to run over and hang on to him. But her pride was more powerful than her nerves, and she stayed a deliberate eight or ten paces back, in the aisle to the left of him. Rob Lucas was over on the right, and Mr. Arkwright was moving quietly along up ahead.

At the end of the display, they stopped and looked at Mr. Arkwright; he raised his hand to point to his right. Then the unnatural silence of the room was broken by a rasping moan and a sharp, retching cough. “Omigod,” said Harriet, “what was that?”

“Shhh,” said Mr. Arkwright. There was another cough. “The bat cave,” he said. “The goddamn bat cave.” He ran over to the wall with his keys in his hand, searched out one, and inserted it into a metal plate. The dark mass ahead and to their left revealed itself as an archway ablaze with light. He ran toward it, followed by the others. At the entrance, he turned to Lucas. “Go to the other end. Check all the grottoes.” Lucas disappeared.

Before they were past the first bend, they heard Lucas shout, “Up here.”

Veronika was facedown, one knee close to her chest, the other leg straight. Her hands were just above her head, and she lay like a small child asleep. As they stared down, she made a slight effort to raise her head, and her rasping breathing echoed in the enclosed space.

“What's that?” said Harriet quietly, pointing down at her.

“Blood,” said Sanders. “She's hurt, but she's still alive. We'd better get—”

“The guard's gone for an ambulance,” said Lucas. “And to get the keys to open up the exhibit to get her out.”

“No, I realize that's blood,” said Harriet. “I'm not completely stupefied. I mean that thing sitting at ten o'clock to her head.”

Sanders looked down for a moment, then vaulted over the railing and landed, much harder than he had expected, in the sharp and nasty surface of the exhibit. He felt Veronika's neck with a delicate touch, then took off his jacket and slid it gently under her face. Lucas reached over the rail and handed him a plastic bag. “Thank you, Constable,” he said, and leaned over to pick up Carlos Ramirez's knife from the floor of the exhibit. “You have good eyes, Miss Jeffries,” he said with a glance in her direction. “But then you always did, didn't you?”

An hour later and Sanders had done everything, for the moment, that he had to do. “Come on,” he said to Harriet. “I'll take you home.”

“Don't be silly,” she said. “I've got my car. If I leave it out there, I'll get a fifty-dollar ticket. If I haven't got one already.”

“Give me your keys,” he said. Harriet was too tired to resist. She pulled them out of her pocket and handed them over. Sanders removed his own keys from his rumpled and dirty jacket, restored to him once the delicate operation of removing the injured girl had been completed, and tossed them over to Lucas. “Take the car back, will you, Constable?” he said. “I'll see you in the morning.”

“I'd be glad to follow behind and pick you up once you've dropped off Miss Jeffries,” said Lucas. “It's no trouble.”

“No, thank you, Constable. That won't be necessary.” If the words hadn't told him, the glare would have; Lucas, suddenly enlightened, waved the keys cheerfully in the direction of the two of them and left.

“Tired?” asked Sanders. They were sitting in a small restaurant with bowls of goulash and a large basket of bread in front of them.

Harriet shook her head. “Starved. I had no idea how hungry I was,” she said as Sanders refilled her wineglass. “I wonder how Nikki is,” she added. “I still feel—”

“Just a minute.” Sanders got up and left the room. In less than two minutes he was back. “She's okay. Not great, but she'll do. There was a botched attempt to cut her throat; hence, the blood. Probably caught the knife in that pendant she was wearing. She has two head injuries, the one at the point of impact, where she landed in that grotto, and another on the side of the head. Which means he coshed her, probably aiming at the temple, tried to cut her throat, and then dumped her into the grotto. She has a concussion, but she didn't lose that much blood, apparently.”

“When did it happen?”

“Before closing time. Otherwise, the guy is still in there; he couldn't get out without setting off alarms. Anyway, she probably would have been seen if she'd been walking around after closing.”

Harriet shook her head. “I can't understand why no one saw her. I mean, she was just lying there! Large as life.”

“Well, even with full lighting the cave has strange shadows. And the guard said that when he checked the area he was so busy chasing a little girl out that maybe he didn't look as carefully as he should have. But basically they really don't expect to find bodies in the exhibits.” He looked over at her pale and unhappy face and covered her hand with his. “Listen, it isn't your fault. Did you make a definite appointment with her to go to the museum? Do you remember?”

Harriet shook her head again. “I don't think so. She was supposed to call me, and we were going to set a time. But then my answering machine was all screwed up and—”

“And so, if she did call and tell you to meet her there at four or five or whenever, you couldn't possibly have gotten the message.”

“Do you think that whoever tried to kill her knew she had telephoned me? And knew who I was and knew where I lived? And took the tape out of my answering machine so I wouldn't go to meet her? That's a lot of ands,” she added with a shaky smile. “You know, John, I don't care for this very much. It sounds like someone living in Clara's house,” she said, thinking of the handsome and plausible young man whom she had so generously offered to help and to whom she had given her business card.

“Eat your goulash like a good girl and drink your wine. I'm not leaving you alone tonight. You'll be safe.”

This time she didn't protest.

At one-thirty a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, Manu Iturralde stepped out of the Iberia Airways 747 and blinked in the pleasantly cool continental dawn of the airport at Malaga, far to the south, the other side of the country from his native San Sebastian. He walked briskly over to passport control, where the usual customs and immigration officials had been bolstered by an unusual number of members of the Guardia Civil. Three unfortunates ahead of him, whose names happened to include the given name Manuel, and one gentleman with a slightly Basque-sounding last name, not terribly long hair, but a definite mustache, had all been called over to one side, for what was probably going to be a lengthy investigation of their luggage and discussion of their papers.