The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (11 page)

"I never saw that side of her. How interesting."

Why were their recollections so different? "Were you two at the same meetings?"

"Rarely. My department is enormous," said Poste. "It was easy for me to break away and attend things in this building. But once the idea for the big show got started, the action moved across the park."

"I usually saw Katrina over at Natural History, after the joint planning got under way. It's a bit looser over there than it is in this mausoleum, as you might guess. That whole place is a lot funkier than the Met," Friedrichs added.

"Had Katrina worked in any other museums before coming here?"

Poste shrugged his shoulders. "I assume so. But I don't know any details."

Friedrichs gave it some thought. "I'm sure she must have had an internship somewhere. The Cloisters would be a pretty plum place to start out. I just don't know where." "Did she confide in either of you?"

"About what?" Friedrichs asked.

"Anything personal. Any bad experience she had while she was here?"

"No. She did seem more somber the last few times we were together. In fact, she broke our dinner date after the last meeting we had. Complained about not feeling well."

"That was in the fall, Anna, wasn't it? That's when she began to talk about going home to help with her father. She was very subdued, as I said. What kind of bad experience do you mean, Detective?" Erik Poste asked.

The telephone rang on a side table in the corner of the room. Gaylord got up to answer it, turning away from us to listen to the caller, then he walked back to the table and spoke to us without resuming his seat. "You'll excuse me, Detective. Ms. Cooper. Erik and Anna will continue to show you around and answer your questions. I've got to go upstairs immediately."

Gaylored ignored Chapman and me, speaking to his colleagues. "Pierre Thibodaux has just resigned."

10

"I'll be happy to talk to you tomorrow, Detective. I've just been ordered up to the director's office. We've clearly got a crisis at the museum that none of us had anticipated an hour ago."

"And I got a dead broad in my locker who croaked on your watch, Mr. Gaylord." Mike walked to the phone. "What's Thibodaux's extension?"

"He--he's not there. In his office, I mean. He was already out the door before Eve got on the phone to me. I wanted to talk to him myself. Honestly."

Timothy Gaylord was as rattled as Mike and I. Thibodaux was either a brilliant actor, able to mask whatever professional trouble was brewing when we talked to him half an hour earlier, or this abrupt resignation might have had something to do with the photograph of Katrina Grooten that we had just stuck under his nose.

"It's Chapman here. I want your boss. I want to talk to him before he leaves the museum, do you understand?" Mike was running his fingers through his straight black hair. I knew he was angry, thinking Thibodaux had pulled a fast one on him. "Yeah? Then why'd you ask Gaylord to come upstairs if he's already gone?"

Mike didn't like Drexler's answer. He slammed the receiver back into the cradle.

"Want me to try to catch up with him on his way out?"

Mike looked at me as though I were crazy. "You know how many ways there are out of this place? The man has at least a ten-minute jump on us, we're buried down here in the bowels of the museum, and you don't know which way he's headed. Give it up, blondie."

Gaylord tried to move to the door again. "I'm afraid I've got to get upstairs. Eve has asked me to call several of the board members to convene a special meeting."

Mike pointed at Gaylord like a trainer ordering a show dog to sit. "Stay put." He used the same finger to dial his squad commander, explaining the situation. "Get a couple of guys over here to get Thibodaux's address. They want to be talking to Eve Drexler. He's probably got a car and driver, too. Get the plate number. Have a detail sit on his apartment to make sure he doesn't go anywhere, will you? Lemme know when you find him, loo. I'd like to pay him another visit. Talk to you later."

Erik Poste and Anna Friedrichs both looked as though they were afraid to move. They were whispering to each other, as surprised by the news as Gaylord was.

"Any of you know what this is about?"

"I think it's clear we're as startled as you are," Poste said. He tapped his fingers nervously on the tabletop.

Anna Friedrichs tried to muster a smile. "I don't think you need to treat him like a criminal, Mr. Chapman. I can't imagine for a moment this is related to Katrina's death." Chapman ignored the comment and spoke to Gaylord again. "Before you run out of here, you want to explain to me where this sarcophagus we found last night has been for the last six months?"

"I'm sorry. It's just hard to balance all this right now. I've got my staff trying to reconstruct the movement of the piece and get you that information as soon as possible."

"How about the innards?"

"Excuse me?"

"Ms. Grooten didn't have a bunk mate in the coffin. Wasn't there a little old princess inside that thing for a few thousand years? Does that mean you got an extra mummy lying around here somewhere?"

Erik Poste stood up and walked to Gaylord's side, putting a hand on his shoulder. "That's a good point, Timothy. Perhaps we should be looking for--"

Gaylord stepped away from his colleague. It seemed this added another problem to his plate that he had not considered. "No, certainly not. If any of my people had come across--well, nothing's been found." He turned to Erik Poste and Anna Friedrichs. "There's no point having word of all this spread through the junior staffers. I know it's an imposition, but Pierre promised Mr. Chapman that he would be shown through the storage area today. Would you two mind very much taking them around?" Poste appeared to accept the assignment more graciously than Anna Friedrichs. She glanced at her watch and exhaled her annoyance audibly.

"You'll see what a monumental task we have, Detective. The sad truth is that no one can tell you where the piece was at any given moment during the past few months. The best we can do is try. You want to scout through a few million other pieces of art, be my guest. I'll turn you over to Anna and Erik, for the moment."

Gaylord passed a large metal ring with dozens of long keys dangling from it to Erik Poste and walked out.

Chapman took his cell phone from his pocket to see whether there were any messages.

"You can forget about getting calls down here, Detective," Anna Friedrichs said. "Might as well use the phone on that table. We're so deep inside the museum that cell phones don't penetrate. Too many thick steel beams in the foundation. It's the bane of my existence when I'm stuck working in the basement."

He dialed the number from the museum phone and asked for Mercer Wallace, who got on the line. "Don't tell your boss what I'm about to ask you to do, 'cause someone up there dropped the ball on this. See if you can find a sixty-one from spring or summer of last year. Three-four precinct. Your complaining witness is a Katrina Grooten. Female, white, about twenty-eight years old. Sneak a copy of the file out, and Coop is buying us dinner at--?" He looked at me for the answer.

"Primola."

"Hear that? Meet us there any time after seven."

The complaint report, the NYPD's uniform force form number 61, along with the follow-ups from the detective division known as 5s, would tell the story of Katrina Grooten's assault. Precinct cops would likely have responded to the original complaint and filled out the initial paperwork, referring the investigation to the detectives of the well-trained Special Victims Squad. If the case had been closed without an arrest, these papers would have to explain why.

"Shall we get started?" Erik Poste led us out of the room. Mike walked beside him while I followed with Anna Friedrichs, and Lissen brought up the rear.

"Each department has its own storeroom, acres and acres of it here under the museum."

"Turf battles?"

"Of course, Detective. Mr. Gaylord's Egyptian galleries are crowd pleasers, always have been. His exhibits take up an inordinate amount of space. Giant stone sculptures and actual pieces of temples and tombs. Dendur was shipped over here from the Aswan as six hundred and eighty-two enormous pieces of rock, and stored wherever they could find a niche, until it could be reassembled as you see it today." We reached another doorway and Erik Poste searched for an engraved number on the shank of one of the keys. He found one that matched the lock and opened the door. Ahead of us on either side were endless lines of funerary objects, some exposed and others sticking partway out of packing crates, with painted figurines and jasper animals sitting upon their backs. Many had plastic drop cloths draped over them, while hundreds more collected dust.

"I believe Mr. Gaylord has about thirty-six thousand objects from his collection on display upstairs. If you care to hazard a guess about how many remain down here, I'll be happy to take the bet."

Mike was walking up and down the narrow rows, looking at labels and reading tags affixed to the objects. He called back to Poste and Friedrichs, "But all the Egyptian stuff is in here, right?"

"Not exactly. There's overflow, especially because so many of the pieces are oversize, and that goes into some of our underpopulated areas."

"What would they be?"

"Islamic art, for example. It's one of our smaller departments. Artifacts, miniatures, ceramic tiles. The pieces aren't as bulky, don't take up as much room. Same for musical instruments. It's not uncommon for some larger pieces--whether Egyptian relics or American period furniture--to be moved for the purpose of storage." "Do the other curators get annoyed at Gaylord for using their space?"

"Of course not. And he's not the only one who trespasses. I've got thousands of paintings in my division. And I need room to do restoration. Many of the pieces are quite sizable and the canvases must be spread out for weeks while workers tend to them. You call on a friendly neighbor, examine his quarters, and find some way to beg for the area you need."

Mike walked back to us. "These things aren't even in numerical order. They're all out of whack."

"That's why we have students and scholars, Detective. Eager young interns. They like nothing better than poring over these treasures and having that `eureka!' moment when they've put their hands on a missing masterpiece. I can assure you that all of these things are carefully cataloged in each department and in the overall collection. They can all be tracked and traced. At least, we've always assumed that."

"The sarcophagus in which Ms. Grooten was found, do you know about that?"

Friedrichs answered: "Mr. Gaylord told us about it shortly before you arrived here."

"Why is it that no one can tell us where it had been stored?" "There are several possibilities, Miss Cooper. We expect to narrow it down within the week." Erik Poste played with his key chain. "Mr. Lissen and Miss Drexler are going over all the records. This storeroom is one of them."

"Makes it look like trying to find a dollar bill you've dropped on the floor at Grand Central Station," Chapman said, trying to sketch the layout in his notepad.

"I'll show you some of the other areas as well, where the Egyptian overflow usually goes. I guess you'll have us all looking for the missing mummy now, won't you, Detective?" Poste said as he walked back to the doorway.

"Have you had a good look at the sarcophagus?" Friedrichs asked. "If it was ever considered for the bestiary exhibit, it might even have been carted over to Natural History at some point in the last few months, to be vetted and photographed for the show."

"Why vetted?"

"To be certain it was authentic. We've suffered that embarrassment before. Put on the big show only to learn that the featured artwork was a forgery or a fake."

"Why would the coffin be in the show?"

"Some of those ancient Egyptian pieces are richly decorated with animal paintings. Not just the ones that belonged to royal families, but also just the well-to-do. You'll see baboons with their arms raised in worship of some god, the hippopotamus that was the patroness of women during pregnancy, or a cobra whose tail encircled the sun for some reason I can't remember. There were falcons and scarabs and sacred cats, many of them portrayed on funeral objects of the wealthy."

"I doubt anyone would have gone to the trouble of moving a sarcophagus over to Natural History," Erik Poste said.

"Objects--even large, heavy ones like that--were being carted back and forth every week," Anna said, correcting him. "Somebody must have put it on the list to be shipped overseas. I've asked Maury to check out those intermuseum transfers, too."

We continued back along the long, gray corridor and around another corner, more than a city block away. Again, Erik Poste inserted a key in a lock and stepped away to let us enter. Here, hundreds of paintings were displayed, one on top of another until they reached the high ceiling, all encased in glass for the entire length of the room. The lighting was dim and none of it shone directly on the canvases. It was obvious we had come to the European painting area, Poste's professional home.

"It's a bit easier to store paintings. Although the size varies, and our walls can make the accommodation to hold them, they're all quite flat. I have a much easier time keeping records of what's in here."

Again, Mike walked up and down the long rows, examining tags and sketching the setup. "What's this door?" He was out of sight, at the far corner of the room.

"It's open, Detective. Go right in." We made our way back to find Chapman, who was standing inside a room the size of my office. It was like a carpentry workshop, with pieces of wood and parts of gilded frames against the walls and on the tabletops. "In each department's storage area, there are shops like these. Some are for the conservators who restore works of art, others make frames or do repairs."

"This isn't the only shop?" Mike's question conjured up the image of endless small cubbyholes within the massive storage areas. Pierre Thibodaux's point about several million objects of art below the museum's surface was becoming very real to both of us.