Still As Death (22 page)

According to the report, police had found no signs of forced entry and so the assumption was that the thieves had simply walked in, pretending to be members of the public, then subdued Keefe and taken their time opening the Plexiglas display cabinets with hacksaws and other tools. The individual works hadn’t been alarmed, so the first cry for help had been Keefe’s activating of the silent alarm.

After the police had been called, Willem Keane had remembered that a student intern was working in a basement storage room and had gone to check on her. Quinn knew it must be Karen Philips to whom the officer writing the report was referring. He skipped ahead. Sure enough, it was noted that Keane had found Karen Philips in the
storage room, her mouth covered with duct tape and her arms and legs taped too. Keane determined that nothing had been taken from the storage room.

Quinn skipped ahead to the witness interviews. There was a list of everyone who had been at the staff meeting, and he felt himself perk up a bit when he read the names. Among them were Willem Keane, Harriet Tyler, Tad Moran, and Frederick Kauffman. It was like old home day. If someone had given the robbers inside information, he or she was probably still around.

The first interview with Denny Keefe had been in the hospital, once he’d regained consciousness. He said that two men dressed in business suits had entered the museum around two-thirty. He had nodded hello to them and then continued his conversation with a volunteer who had been on duty but was going home. He said goodbye to her and returned to his post behind the ticket desk. He said that he had checked the closed-circuit television monitors every once in a while but hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. The next thing he remembered was being attacked from behind. He described the men as being of medium height and build, one with gray hair and one with brown hair. They had not been carrying any luggage or large bags, as far as he remembered.

The next interview was with Willem Keane, who was described as the “curater of Egypt antiquities.” What was it about cops? They had to be about the worst spellers in the world. Keane—and the other staff members—didn’t have much to say. They had gone over to the Jansen Museum next door for the meeting and come back around three-twenty to find Keefe bound on the floor behind the ticket desk.

The only thing that was of interest to Quinn was that Keane had gone alone to check the museum and then again to look for Karen Philips. He’d have to check, but he was pretty sure that it was against the museum’s security procedures for any member of the staff other than the director of security to respond to a possible breach of security by himself or herself. But things must have been
pretty chaotic. Quinn doubted that anyone had been thinking about security procedures.

Quinn glanced up at the clock. Agent Kirschner would be arriving soon, so he skimmed over the rest of the papers in the top file.

Finally, he came to the Cambridge PD’s interview with Karen Philips. He assumed the FBI had conducted a much more extensive one when they’d been assigned the case, but she had given the basics in the initial interview. She had been working alone in one of the study rooms in the storage area and had opened the door to let some air in. The interviewing officer had noted that she seemed nervous about this detail, since it was apparently against security protocol. She had heard men’s voices in the basement gallery and, in her surprise at hearing a loud noise, had knocked over a stool when they had broken into the first cabinet. They were alerted to her presence and had come in and taped her mouth as well as her arms and legs. She had given a description of the men but seemed unable to remember much about them.

All in all, it was pretty straightforward. But somewhere, Quinn suspected, someone had lied.

“The body was found right next to the chest,” Quinn told Special Agent Steve Kirschner. “Ms. Ortiz said she didn’t notice that the cabinet had been breached. It was the second person on the scene who noticed that one of the stoppers was missing.”

Kirschner, Quinn decided, had to be nearing retirement. He still looked fairly young, his gray hair cut in a short crew, his trim body lean and rangy. But he had the bored energy of someone who wasn’t going to have to live with the consequences of anything he did anymore. He was professional enough, but Quinn knew the signs. He reminded him of Marino, his old partner, who had checked out even before he’d hurt his back.

Kirschner looked through the crime scene photos Quinn had given him. “It seems pretty clear that he—or they, I guess—were in
the process of taking the chest and were surprised by the cleaning woman. What was her name again?”

“Olga Levitch,” Quinn said.

“Yeah.” He looked around. “It’s a pretty similar MO to the 1979 theft, isn’t it? Coming in while the place is open to the public but at a time when it won’t be full of people. Pretty smart.”

“I guess,” Quinn said. “Isn’t that sort of Museum Theft 101, though?”

“Nah,” Kirschner said. “This is a little more nuanced. Think about it. They would have had to have inside info about the staff meeting. And I’m thinking the same thing about the opening. You know? You might see in the paper or whatever that there was going to be an opening, but you wouldn’t know what the situation was going to be—that the basement gallery was probably mostly empty, that this is where the chest would be—unless you knew a lot about this place.”

“You’re right.” Quinn thought for a moment. “You had any guesses about who the inside person was way back when?”

“Not really. Everyone checked out okay, though …”

“What?”

“I don’t know if it’s even worth mentioning, but the director, Hector Ribling. He struck me as kind of a cold fish. I always wondered about him.”

“Really?” Quinn knew that Ribling, who had retired ten years ago, hadn’t been at the opening. But perhaps he was still in contact with the museum staff and could have passed on the necessary information.

“Don’t get your hopes up. He died a couple years ago. I’d been keeping tabs on him.”

“Damn. So how does this work? I’ve never had something that overlapped with you guys before. And this one’s complicated because the art theft didn’t actually occur.”

“Well, we’ll work our intelligence, see if we can find out anything there. If I were you, I’d look closely at everyone who was in the museum
during that opening. I’m betting there’s someone there who knows more than they’re saying.”

“That’s my plan.” They both looked at the photos of Olga Levitch’s body, outlined in blood on the marble.

“The dead woman,” Kirschner said. “Any chance she had anything to do with it?”

“Doubt it. She’d worked here a long time, but if she made any money from selling out the museum, she sure didn’t spend it on herself. I saw her apartment. I’m telling you. She came over from Moscow or somewhere and it had to be worse than anything she’d have gotten over there.”

“Maybe she was sending it home. That’s what a lot of these immigrants do.”

“I guess. We’re looking into charities, but we haven’t found anything.” Quinn was pretty convinced that Olga Levitch didn’t have anyone to send money to, but it gave him an idea. Had any of the other people with intimate knowledge of the museum spent large amounts of money in 1980?

“You know, there’s something else I should tell you,” Kirschner said. “I don’t know if there’s anything to it, but it’s an open investigation, so …”

“Yeah?” Something in his voice made Quinn pay attention.

“I don’t know how much you know about art collecting and museums.” He waited for Quinn to give some indication of how much he did know, but when it didn’t come, he went on. “We’ve been in touch with the Egyptian authorities.” He lowered his voice as though the walls themselves could hear. “There’s some question about the provenance of some of the pieces they’ve got. It’s complicated, but some of the things were donated by a man named Arthur Maloof. He apparently had a family collection that had been in place since before 1970, which is when the UNESCO convention prohibiting things being taken out of Egypt went through. I can get you more information if you want, but basically, if you can prove legitimate
ownership of antiquities before then, you’re in the clear. Some people, though, have figured out ways of making things look legitimate. They create fake documentation for these family collections, old labels, handwritten documents, some of it’s amazingly real looking. You should see it. Anyway, we’re looking at all the places Maloof placed items from his collection. We don’t have anything specific yet, but the museum is certainly on the list.”

“Is Keane implicated?”

“Oh, no. He seems to be a victim at this point, if it turns out Maloof faked the provenances of any pieces at the museum, but obviously it’s embarrassing for him. It’s difficult because Maloof is dead, so we’re dealing with his estate.”

“So you think it might be related to the murder?”

“I doubt it, but someone did try to steal an Egyptian piece. By the way, I looked into Hutchinson, today, because of this latest theft, and there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the piece he donated. Anyway, I thought you should have all the facts. I’ll get you the relevant information. As I say, nothing’s been proved. The investigation is still open.” He stood up. “And I need to go.”

“Right. Hey. do you remember interviewing a Karen Philips? At the time of the 1979 theft?”

“That was about twenty-five years ago,” Kirschner said. “I’m retiring at the end of the year. To be honest with you, my memory’s gotten worse and worse the closer I get.”

“She was a student intern at the museum. According to the files, she was working in one of the storage areas in the basement, I think it was. She had propped the door open and the thieves discovered her, tied her up.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kirschner said. “I’d forgotten there was another witness. It’s funny you asking about her. It seemed pretty clear that she was tied up the whole time, but I remember I wondered about whether she was the one who’d passed on the inside scoop. We kept asking her about what had happened, and she didn’t want to talk about it. Just said they’d tied her up and that was all. She sort of gave
us a description, but she seemed scared to me. Or …” He thought for a moment. “It was more like she was in shock. You know when someone’s seen something really awful. I remember thinking that somebody had scared the crap out of that little girl.”

IT WASN’T HARD TO FIND the names of the women who had been members of the WAWAs at the same time as Karen Philips. Sweeney went back to the yearbooks in the library and found, in the extracurricular activities section of the yearbook for the year before Karen died, a picture of a group of serious-looking young women—Karen at one end—sitting on a couch, with the two in the front holding a banner reading,
WOMEN ANGRY, WOMEN ACTIVE
. Below the picture, the caption read, “L–R, Mary Haster, Angie Bellini, Rose Moreham, Davida Singleton, Felicia Hu, Susan Esterhaus, and Karen Philips.” Sweeney wrote down the names of the other women and headed over to the alumni office. She identified herself to the secretary and said she was working on a project related to the history of women in higher education and needed to contact some alumnae. The secretary easily found the women’s current contact information in the database and wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper.

When Sweeney and Ian had woken up that morning, it had looked a little like rain, the sky gray and congested, the air humid and full of heat. Nothing had come of the rain clouds, but the air
was still so heavy Sweeney felt she was wading through a swimming pool as she made her way back to her car.

At home, she changed out of her sweat-soaked clothes. She found the General curled up on the cool tiles in the kitchen and bent to scratch his ears. “The heat’s too much for you, huh?” He blinked his eyes open for a moment, then closed them again.

She got herself a cold beer from the fridge, telling herself it was the only thing that was going to cool her down, and started calling the WAWA women, as she’d come to think of them.

It took a while to find someone at home, but when she got to the fifth woman on the list, Felicia Hu, she was at her home in Manhattan. When Sweeney explained what she was doing and that she wanted to know more about Karen Philips, Hu hesitated for a minute before saying, “I haven’t thought about her in years. God, it’s so strange that something that affected me so deeply at the time could just kind of … leave me. I’m sorry, what did you want to know about her?”

Sweeney explained that she taught at the university and had gotten interested in women’s organizations throughout the university’s history. “I learned about Karen Philips’s suicide and I thought it might be interesting to examine the reasons behind it.”

“I never really heard that there was a reason behind it.”

“So you were surprised?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I should explain that Karen and I weren’t particularly close. If you want someone who knew her well, you should call Susan Esterhaus. I can give you her work number if you want. Anyway, I was saying that I wasn’t really surprised. She had been depressed for a while before she did it. We all knew it, all the WAWAs, but no one could get her to talk about why. She obviously wasn’t sleeping, and she seemed angry. It was during that time leading up to her suicide that she got really involved in the group.”

“She hadn’t been involved before? Her picture was in the yearbook photo.”

“Yeah, they must have taken it around the holidays because I remember
she didn’t really start coming to meetings and helping us with events until that fall.”

“We’re talking about the fall and winter of 1979?”

“That’s right. I graduated that next year and Karen was class of eighty-one. She had gone to a rally we put on, something about sexual violence against women, and she came to the next meeting and said she wanted to get involved. She was really passionate about the organization. We were happy to have her.”

“When did she start seeming depressed to you?”

“It’s hard to say. It was gradual, but I do remember seeing her after the Thanksgiving break and she looked terrible. She said she hadn’t been sleeping well, but again, she wouldn’t talk about why.”