Murder in the Smithsonian (3 page)

A drop of bright red oxygenated blood hit the floor in front of him.

“My God,
look
,” a woman said, pointing upward.

Now a series of red drops splattered the edge of the compass rose. The pendulum reached the side where the group stood, then swung back in the other direction, catching the marker and toppling it.

“Lewis…?” Joline said.

Slowly, as though having been photographed in slow motion, Lewis Tunney’s body slipped over the second floor railing and fell to the compass rose. Protruding from his back was a sword that had once belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

The pendulum reached its apex on the other side, then headed back toward the vice president, stopping for the first time in years as it thudded into the lifeless body of the night’s keynote speaker, the late Dr. Lewis Tunney.

Tunney’s body was removed from the National Museum of American History in a black body bag. As it passed, Alfred Throckly shook his head. “My God…” The tone in his voice seemed a blend of shock and impatience.

The man next to him said, “It takes time, Mr. Throckly. Procedures.”

“What now, Captain?”

“More procedures.”

Captain Mac Hanrahan, chief of detectives of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, excused himself from the museum director and went to the Constitution Avenue entrance. He stepped back to allow two uniformed policemen to carry the body bag outside, then followed. The street was choked with vehicles, some from MPD, most belonging to news media. Three large television remote trucks were parked on the sidewalk. Powerful lights mounted on their roofs turned night into day.

At the sight of Hanrahan a swell of reporters converged on the entrance.

“Take it easy,” Hanrahan said, holding up his hands. “I’ll have something to tell you in an hour.”

“Who is it?” a reporter called out.

“The victim was not a government official, he was a private citizen.”

Hanrahan saw that the officers carrying Tunney’s body could not get through the crowd to a waiting ambulance. Lights and cameras were trained on the bag. “Ghouls,” Hanrahan muttered, and in a louder voice: “Let them through, damn it, unless you want an obstruction rap.”

“Is the vice president still inside?” another reporter asked.

Hanrahan nodded and went inside, where Alfred Throckly was waiting.

“This is terrible,” Throckly said, “beyond belief. What perverse, horrible…?”

Hanrahan saw that Vice President William Oxenhauer and his wife were talking with his assistant, Lieutenant Joe Pearl. He went up to them. “Sorry for the delay, Mr. Vice President.”

Oxenhauer’s face was ashen. The strain of Joline’s earlier hysteria still showed, though she was now under control. Her eyes were red, watery. “Don’t worry about us, Captain, please…” Oxenhauer said, “just do what you have to do.”

A Secret Serviceman took Hanrahan aside. “The vice president should leave, Captain. He has a full schedule tomorrow—”

“Yes, I understand.”…“Why don’t you and Mrs. Oxenhauer go home now, sir. You’re not involved in this and—”

Joline looked sharply at him. “Lewis Tunney was one of our closest friends.”

Oxenhauer put his arm around her. “The captain is only trying to help, darling. He’s not being unkind. He’s right, let’s go home.”

“It’s wall-to-wall press out there, sir,” Hanrahan told him.

Throckly, who’d joined them, said, “There’s an exit through the kitchen.”

Oxenhauer told a Secret Serviceman to have the limo pull around to the kitchen exit, and to Hanrahan said, “Thank you for your courtesy, Captain. Could I have a word with you?”

They moved halfway around the pendulum railing. Oxenhauer checked to see that they weren’t being overheard. “I learned something tonight that might have bearing on your investigation, Captain…”

“Oh?”

The vice president again looked over his shoulder. “It can wait until tomorrow… Please come to my office at ten.”

“Well, sir, maybe I should be the one to decide whether it can wait, Mr. Vice President. This is a murder we’re dealing with—”

“Of course, but I’d much appreciate your allowing me to follow your earlier suggestion. I’d like to take Mrs. Oxenhauer home. She’s very upset.”

Hanrahan’s instinct was to press the matter then and there, but Oxenhauer was, after all, the vice president of the United States… “Thank you for your cooperation, sir. I’ll be there at ten.”

He watched them leave, then followed Lieutenant Joe Pearl into the dining room, where others at the party had been corralled. A team of six detectives was busy establishing the identity of each person who had been in the museum at the time of the murder, noting addresses and phone numbers, asking questions about movement during the evening and warning that they were not to leave Washington until further notice.

“Anything turn up?” Hanrahan asked Pearl.

“I don’t think so. Maybe we’ll put something together
after we assimilate and correlate the statements—”

“
Assimilate
and
correlate
?”

Pearl picked lint from Hanrahan’s lapel. “You’re about to lose a button, Captain.”

“Yeah, I know.” Hanrahan slapped Pearl on the back. His assistant was only slightly younger—Hanrahan was forty-seven, Pearl forty-one—but displayed a capacity for jargon that never failed to amuse his boss. Pearl had a master’s degree in sociology. Hanrahan had graduated high school. Period. Pearl was Jewish, and relatively devout. Hanrahan’s parents were Irish, and he was raised a devout Catholic, although he’d broken away from the church years ago. He’d recently divorced after twenty-two years of marriage. His mother had said at the time of the separation, “That’s what happens when you marry out of your faith, Mac. You go to bed with swine, you get up with swine.” Hanrahan’s wife had been Baptist, which, he told his mother, hardly made her a swine.

His personal feelings about his ex-wife were another matter. She’d taken up with a man the age of their eldest son, twenty-five, in order, she said, to establish her identity as a “female being” and to catch up with the sexual revolution she’d missed out on. Hanrahan hadn’t contested the divorce. He wasn’t interested in competition with a damned flower child. His last words to his wife when she left were, “Remember, you go to bed with swine, you get up with swine.” At least she’d laughed at that. He didn’t…

The museum’s security director, L. D. Rowland, who’d been called from his home right after the murder, asked for a few minutes with Hanrahan. They left the dining room and went to the second floor, the site of the Cincinnati-Harsa exhibition. Rowland, a black
man with hair like pasted-on cotton balls, pointed to the floor.

“Yeah, we got that,” Hanrahan said, referring to drops of blood leading from the exhibit area to the railing Tunney had fallen over. “Did your men see anybody at all leave the building about the time of the murder?”

“They say no, but of course it’s hard to be positive about that sort of thing. I have a good staff, though.”

“I’m sure you do. Let me ask you something, Mr. Rowland. Why wasn’t there an alarm system on the case over there?” He pointed to where the Legion of Harsa’s medal had been displayed, next to the Society of the Cincinnati’s symbol. The glass covering the Harsa medal was smashed and the medal was missing.

“Museum policy now, Captain Hanrahan, not that I entirely agree with it, which is between you and me. Alarms can be triggered by a lot of things besides an actual break-in. It happened so many times in the past—short circuits, breakdowns, you name it, they decided to do away with the system. The idea is, it’s sort of like sticking labels on windows warning intruders that a house is armed with a burglar alarm. It doesn’t matter whether it is or not so long as a potential intruder thinks it is. I guess the museum figures people will assume these things are protected and not try anything. And at the same time avoid false alarms. I also hear talk they’re thinking of installing a more sophisticated, newer system. Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile it looks like they assumed wrong this time, or these intruders knew there wasn’t an alarm.” He went to the broken display case. Lab technicians had finished dusting for fingerprints and had taken photographs of the scene. The area had been roped off, including the path Tunney had staggered along from the exhibit area to the pendulum railing. Signs warning
that it was the scene of the crime and that no one was to enter hung from the blue ropes. Two uniformed MPD officers stood guard. Broken glass from the display case had been carefully swept up and removed with other evidence.

“Tell me about the medal that was in there,” Hanrahan said to Rowland.

Rowland shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it, Captain. I heard it wasn’t worth a hell of a lot—”

“It was covered with jewels.”

“Compared to other things in here, Captain, it was nickel-and-dime.”

Hanrahan leaned closer and read a card below the smashed glass.

Hanrahan now read the card beneath the Society of the Cincinnati’s medal, which rested securely behind glass that was intact.

“A lot of diamonds,” Hanrahan said.

“I guess maybe they were cheaper then,” Rowland said.

Hanrahan walked the route Tunney had taken from the display area to the pendulum, carefully avoiding the dried drops of blood. He reached the railing and looked down into the pit, where the pendulum was once again in motion. Guests already interviewed and logged were leaving. Joe Pearl stood near the main floor railing.

“Joe,” Hanrahan called.

Pearl looked up. “Yeah?”

“Finished up?”

“I think so.”

“You going back?”

“Might as well. We’ll get the steno transcripts of the initial statements typed. Need me?”

“No, I’ll be back in a while.”

“Okay, Mac.” Pearl looked down at a chalk outline of Tunney’s body, then walked out of Hanrahan’s view.

Hanrahan turned to Rowland. “I’d like to see the entire museum again.”

“Never been here before, Captain?”

“Never have. Museums have always… well, I guess I just never had the time.”

“I never did either ’til I started working here.” His laugh was warm. “I’ll send somebody with you. I’ve got paperwork to do, you know how it is.”

Ten minutes later Hanrahan walked alongside a security guard who wore a starched white shirt, black tie and officer’s cap. A leash in his hand was attached to a German shepherd.

“Been using dogs long?” Hanrahan asked as they climbed stairs leading to the second floor. He didn’t want to admit it but the dog made him nervous, the way MPD dogs did.

“Yup,” the guard said, “they been around here longer than me.”

They started in the Nation of Nations exhibit, more than five thousand original objects and documents dedicated to the diversity of people who have come to America over the years, then moved to Everyday Life in America, where the fabric of the American character was displayed, from a classic colonial parlor in Virginia to a Victorian-Gothic bedroom in Connecticut, from a Philadelphia banker’s library to a New England one-room schoolhouse.

Hanrahan was tempted to linger at some of the displays but knew he wasn’t there as a sightseer. He needed to have a better sense of the building in which
this bizarre murder had taken place, wanted to
know
it. “You must get to know a lot about American history,” he said to the guard as they entered the We the People area—artifacts of the westward expansion, Indian wars, the Civil War, gifts to the fledgling nation from foreign powers, all based on Lincoln’s words, “…government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

“I don’t look much at this stuff,” the guard said. “I do my job, that’s about it.”

“I understand.” And he did. It was how he sometimes excused himself for not living enough of the rich full life his ex-wife used to talk about.

Hanrahan had heard of the First Ladies’ Gown exhibition. It had been written up often in the papers and was the museum’s most popular attraction. Started in 1943 by renowned curator Margaret Brown Klapthor, it had steadily grown until reaching its current size, a detailed and revealing view of the women behind the great men, the nation’s first ladies.

They stopped in front of one of many large, glass-walled rooms representing a White House parlor of the mid-nineteenth century. Hanrahan saw himself in the glass, touched his salt-and-pepper beard, ran his hand over baldness extending from his forehead to the crown that was bordered by fringes of what had once been a full head of black hair. Hanrahan never understood why he was balding. His father had had a full head of hair until he died at the age of eighty-four. At least he hadn’t put on weight like his father. He still weighed a trim 170 pounds, about right for his six-foot frame. It wasn’t that he made a big deal out of trying to stay slim, he just never put on weight. Metabolism, he figured. So nature evened things up. Bald but good metabolism. Couldn’t have everything…