Still As Death (18 page)

“Sounds like good work. Havrilek told me you did a lot of that
back in Ohio. Good work, I mean.” He was going to ask her why she’d moved east, but her face suddenly shut down, all her features collapsing into worry, and she stood up.

Quinn filled the awkward silence. “I talked to an FBI field agent this morning. They’re going to help us out any way they can. And I think one angle that may be good is to look at who would have bought the chest if it had been successfully stolen.”

“That guy, the English guy who was at the opening. He said he’d be happy to help if we needed him. He knows about the art world, that kind of thing, right?”

Quinn grudgingly admitted to himself that she had a point.

“Listen,” he said. “I want you to come with me to look at Olga Levitch’s apartment, and then I need you to do some legwork on this girl, okay? Luz Ramirez.” They’d almost forgotten about her in the excitement over the attempted theft at the museum. They needed to get back to her before the trail went cold. And he felt like he wanted to work this museum thing alone for a little while, just put his head down and work on it, without having to deal with Ellie, with the two hundred ways she had of irritating him.

He could see her push down her disappointment. The museum case was the big time, the one that would get her noticed. But she was a good soldier and she said, “Okay. Yeah.”

“Let me know what you need, okay?”

“Sure.” She nodded and then looked away, and he was afraid she was going to start crying. He almost relented, but then he thought of all the crappy cases he’d worked as a junior detective. This was the way it worked. You had to put in your time.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s go see what we can find in her apartment.”

THEY’D GOTTEN OLGA LEVITCH’S ADDRESS through the university’s payroll department after the address Keane gave them turned out to be outdated. As they pulled up in front of the ugly brick building on a run-down street, Ellie looked up at the building and said, “I wonder if this is what she thought she was coming to when she came to America.”

“Hey,” Quinn said. “It’s better than what a lot of people have.”

But it was pretty awful, a hostile-looking group of teenage boys hanging around out front and hypodermic needles littering the sidewalk. The front door was locked, and when they asked the boys where they could find the manager, they shrugged and pointed around the side of the building.

The malnourished-looking woman sitting in front of a small portable TV in the building manager’s office told them she was not the manager, but when Quinn identified himself and informed her that he needed access to Olga Levitch’s apartment, she stood up, took a key off the Peg-Board on the wall, and handed it to him, all without taking her eyes from the soap opera on the television. “Bring it back when you’re done,” she said, a hand picking obsessively at
her overly permed hair. Apparently the police often needed access to apartments in the building.

“Hey,” Quinn said, shouting over the voices of the glamorous people on the screen. “Did you know her?”

The woman looked up blankly. “She didn’t talk to anyone. She was afraid of the police. One time there was a fire alarm and we had to get everyone out of the building, and she wouldn’t come out. She was afraid they were going to torture her something.” Someone started sobbing on the TV and she snapped her head back, afraid she’d missed something. Quinn rolled his eyes at Ellie.

Number 7 was a tiny studio apartment on the second floor. When Quinn opened the door, they were assaulted by the overly sweet scent of apples and cinnamon. The source of the fragrance was a pink basket of potpourri sitting on the only table in the room, a round kitchen table with a blue linoleum top. “Jeez,” Ellie said. “That’s pretty strong. I think you’re supposed to put it inside something.”

“I bet the cooking smells in a building like this are pretty bad,” Quinn said, picking up a handful of the potpourri and letting it fall between his fingers. He looked around the room, taking in the single bed, neatly made, with its white bedspread and a single pillow in a pink pillowcase at the head. There was a small bathroom through a door at the end of the room and a small closet next to the bathroom. The kitchen consisted of a half-sized refrigerator and an electric hot plate on top of a rolling butcher block that was pushed against the wall. Underneath the butcher block were what appeared to be all of Olga Levitch’s kitchen things: three nice china plates with a rose pattern on them, two matching teacups and saucers, an old Folger’s coffee can containing three forks, four knives, a large silver serving spoon, and a spatula.

“Not much here,” Quinn said. “Look around and see if you see anything like an address book or a phone list.” Ellie went to the table where the potpourri was and leafed through a stack of papers.

“These are just receipts, for groceries it looks like.” She looked around the room. “There’s no telephone, is there?”

Quinn looked too. “You’re right. So much for a phone list. There’s nothing here. How could someone have gone through so much of her life without buying any more stuff than this?” He took a quick look in the closet. Olga Levitch had owned four dark green uniforms, which she must have worn to clean, two identical olive cardigan sweaters, a pair of jeans that looked as though they had never been worn, and a couple of skirts and dresses that were old enough to have been brought over from Russia. There was a pink bathrobe that seemed to be the only comfortable thing she owned, and a matching pair of slippers.

On the top shelf of the closet was a shoe box. Quinn got excited for a moment, thinking it might hold some secret journals or old family photographs, but it held a pair of shoes, green silk pumps that wouldn’t match anything else in the closet. That was it. Quinn closed the closet door and looked around the room again.

But there was one more thing. On the windowsill was a blue box, made of fancy cardboard and stamped with some kind of logo on the outside. There was a little card taped to the back. He opened it and read, “Happy Holidays from Cyrus and Susanna Hutchinson.”

“What’s inside?” Ellie asked, reading the card over his shoulder.

Quinn opened the box and took out a still-sealed bottle of scotch whisky. He didn’t recognize the brand, but he knew it was expensive from the writing and the little picture of mountains and a lake drawn on the label.

“This bottle probably cost two hundred dollars,” he said.

Ellie whistled. “Did you know that American and Irish whiskey is spelled with an ‘e’ but Scotch whisky isn’t?” she asked him. “Just whisky with a ‘y.’ ”

“If it didn’t have that card on it, I’d be thinking she had a thing for very expensive booze,” he said. “Because the thing I’m wondering is, where did all her money go? She wasn’t rich, but she would have made more money than this.” He gestured around at the apartment.

“Maybe she gave it to charity,” Ellie said. “You sometimes read
about these people who live like recluses and then when they die it turns out they were millionaires and they gave everything to a cat hospital or something.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “Check on it. Call around to some of the charities. She was a Soviet Jew, I guess. Russian, whatever. Keane said something about refuseniks. Figure out what he was talking about and see if they have any charities for them.”

“Okay.” Ellie, looking pleased, wrote it down in her book.

“I think that’s it,” Quinn said. “Let’s go downstairs and break it to the soap opera addict that whoever the manager is has to find another sucker to rent this rat hole.”

SWEENEY FOUND WILLEM IN HIS OFFICE, tapping away on his computer keyboard and looking generally cheerful, as though a murder hadn’t occurred in his museum only a few nights before.

Aida
was playing on the CD player on his bookshelf, and he was humming, mouthing a few bars of Italian here and there.

“Sweeney, just the person I wanted to see,” he said. “I’ve decided to extend the dates of the exhibition. It looks like we’re going to be closed for a while, and I don’t want this to preclude people from seeing it, especially after that wonderful write-up.”

“Thanks, Willem.” Sweeney felt kind of funny about his evident good cheer. It was nice of him to have made the decision, but couldn’t he have waited a few days? “Hey, I guess we never found that eighteenth-dynasty collar I got interested in, did we?”

His face clouded over. “I’m furious about that. I don’t know what could have happened to it. What kind of a museum are we? Where pieces just disappear from storage. I went and had a look around myself and I couldn’t find it. It must have been taken or misplaced. I’m very sorry.” He looked up at her. “But you wanted it for the exhibition, right? You’re not still interested in it?”

“It was beautiful. I’d love to see it, even if we’re not going to display it.”

“Yes, although it’s fairly unremarkable. If we had to lose something, it’s not a bad thing to lose. Was that all?” He glanced back at his computer screen as though he considered the conversation finished.

“Willem, there was a student intern here named Karen Philips. She committed suicide her senior year. Her name was in the file on the falcon collar. It looks like she was maybe doing some research on it. Did she ever talk to you?”

Willem cocked his head and fixed his eyes sadly on a point over Sweeney’s shoulder. “That was the most awful …” His voice trailed off. “I remember she was interested in funeral jewelry. She was pretty excited when the piece was donated.”

Sweeney took a deep breath. “I was thinking. The date on her note in the file is the same as the date of the robbery. Doesn’t it make sense that maybe it was taken during the robbery?”

Willem looked up at her, a smile spreading across his face. “You know, you just may be right. She was in one of the study rooms when I found her. She could have been examining the collar, and in the chaos after the robbery, we wouldn’t have looked to make sure that something from storage was there. We were too concerned with the big items taken from the gallery. I think you may have it.”

But Sweeney saw the flaw in her theory. “But wouldn’t Karen have said something? Surely she would have known if it had been taken.”

Willem thought for a moment. “She was in shock, really shaken up. I found her and I remember the way she looked. It’s possible that she just didn’t think of it. Or …” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Sweeney followed his line of thought.
Or maybe Karen had taken it herself
. She left Willem and went down to make copies of the file on the collar.

Her cell phone rang just as she was finishing up, and she looked down to see Quinn’s number on the screen.

“Are you doing okay?” he asked when she answered. “And are
you some kind of witch or something? You show up at my house talking about a robbery at the museum, and bang! A couple of weeks later, someone tries to rob the museum.”

“Now do you believe me that there’s something strange about all of this?”

He laughed. “I still think that you’re drawing connections between things that aren’t necessarily connected, but I have to admit the attempted robbery is pretty suspicious.”

“So you think the two robberies are connected? They have to be, don’t they?”

There must have been someone else in the room because he said, in a slightly stiff voice, “Certainly seems that way. Listen, I was hoping we could talk.” He hesitated. “I was also hoping I could talk to Ian. I need someone who knows about art dealing, how someone might try to sell an artifact. Hypothetically.”

“Oh.” She felt her face flush. “Of course. Yeah, maybe we could … Do you want to go out for a drink tonight and we can talk? Can you get a babysitter?”

“Yeah, Patience is pretty good that way. How about six-thirty at Flannery’s?” It was a pub in Central Square.

“Good,” Sweeney said. “I’ll see you there.” She corrected herself.
“We’ll
see you there.”

In her office, she sat at her desk and looked out the window, watching late commuters drive by. The idea of going out for a drink with Quinn and Ian made her suddenly jittery. Why was that? If Ian was going to be in her life, she was going to have to get comfortable introducing him to her friends. But Quinn wasn’t exactly a friend.

What was he? In Concord, she had come to think of him as a friend. They had been engaged in a mutual pursuit, had spent a lot of time with each other under fairly intense circumstances. What had Toby said, that he thought she was attracted to Quinn? Well, she probably was. After all, he was a good-looking guy. She did like him. She thought he was a good father and he had shown himself to be a good policeman. Who wouldn’t be attracted to him?

But, she told herself, it’s more than that, isn’t it? A couple of times over the past year, she’d awakened from a dream and known that she had dreamt of him again, dreamt that they were kissing, dreamt that she was running her hands through the short hair at the back of his neck. It was what she remembered, the bristly feel of his hair beneath her fingers.

But that was perfectly normal. People had sexual dreams about all kinds of odd people, didn’t they? Their bosses, their relatives. It didn’t mean anything.

She shook her head. It was perfectly normal. There wasn’t anything wrong with her at all.

SHE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY responding to e-mail and generally cleaning up details left over from the exhibition. When she was done, she went online and Googled Arthur Maloof to see if anything interesting came up. The first thing she discovered was that he had died a year previously. His obituary in
The New York Times
gave her the basics: humble beginnings, educated at the university, a successful career as an international financier, and an interest in collecting antiquities from ancient Egypt. Toward the end of his life, he had become an enthusiastic philanthropist and had donated pieces from his collections to many of the great American museums. Along with references to his collections of Egyptian statuary and reliefs, she found an inordinate number of photographs of him in a tuxedo at fancy charity events. But there wasn’t anything suggesting that he wasn’t on the up-and-up.