The Bone Vault

8

Thibodaux walked to his desk, opened the drawer, and removed a pair of reading glasses from a metal case. He studied the photograph and shrugged his shoulders.

“I meet so many young people here, Detective. You must forgive me.” He looked at his assistant. It wasn’t a glare, but it seemed to me that it was a signal for her to back off. “I’m sure I don’t recall any specifics, Eve. Is there any reason Miss Grooten should have stood out to me?”

Eve had resumed her place at the table and picked up her notebook. “I might be mistaken, Pierre. It’s possible you had nothing to do with her at all.”

“Did she work for us?” he asked, looking perplexed.

“Not here. At the Cloisters.”

Most of the Met’s collection of medieval art is housed in the Cloisters, the dismantled elements of several European monasteries that were shipped to America by a prominent sculptor in the early 1900s, and then given to the museum by John D. Rockefeller. The magnificent setting is in northern Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River.

“Are you familiar with-?”

Before Thibodaux could finish the question, Mike had to prove that his knowledge of the Met wasn’t limited to just one branch. “Fort Tryon Park. Thirty-fourth Precinct.” I didn’t need a reminder of our last trip to that neighborhood, when we had investigated the murder of a prominent art dealer.

“I’m not sure what the girl did there,” Eve continued, “but she was working on some aspect of the big bestiary exhibition we’re doing with the Museum of Natural History next spring, the one that was just announced last evening. We had several planning sessions in this office. Of course, Mr. Thibodaux is abroad so frequently that I may have been mistaken that he was present for any of them.”

“It’s a terrible pity that this-this victim-is someone from our own family.” The director was exhibiting the appropriate degree of remorse for us now. It was impossible for me to read his expression and know whether he was the least bit sincere.

“Wouldn’t someone from the museum have missed her?”

“I’ll have to get them to pull her personnel file, Mr. Chapman,” Eve Drexler said, turning a page to make a list of things to do. “What else will you need?”

“Everything you’ve got. Who she worked with, what she did, where she lived, when she started here, and when she left. Of course, we’ll need someone to identify the body. How well did you know her, Ms. Drexler?”

The woman was clearly not used to being the center of attention. She was the backup to the boss, but wasn’t supposed to be involved herself. “I-uh-I can’t say that I knew her at all. I mean, we were both at this table together two or three times, but-”

“You came up with her name pretty quick.”

“I’m good at remembering names and faces, Detective. I have to be.”

“That’s-as you say in English-not my forte, Mr. Chapman. Eve stands at my shoulder at all our receptions, whispering in my ear as people approach.” Thibodaux’s smile seemed forced. “It seems the larger their collections, the more likely I am to block out their names when I need them most. It’s a dangerous thing when you’re courting potential donors, trying to get them to include the Met in their estate planning. They each want to believe that they have become my best friend.”

“Did you talk to her at all, one-on-one? Find out anything about her?”

“Well, I remember making small talk with her,” Drexler said, forefinger pressed against her forehead, as though digging for her recollections. “She had an accent, and since so many of our curatorial staff are from all over the world, naturally I inquired where she was from. You know, waiting for the meeting to get under way. I guessed Australia, but I was wrong. She is-she was, I’m sorry-she was South African.”

“Dutch name, right?” Chapman asked.

“Yes, we also talked about that. Her family had been there for almost two hundred years. Boers.” Dutch settlers who had moved to the African continent as early as the seventeenth century.

“Keep going. What else did she tell you?”

“That she worked at the Cloisters, of course. Here on some kind of visa. I don’t remember any other conversation. She seemed rather shy. Didn’t speak up at the meetings, didn’t really participate very much.”

Mike pointed at her leather notebook. “You take minutes?”

“Yes, I usually did.” She looked down the length of the table, at Thibodaux, as though she was seeking his advice.

“I’d like to see those.”

The director took his cue. “I’ll have Eve find them. We’ll have to figure out the relevant dates in order to do that.”

Ten minutes with Eve Drexler and you knew she could put her fingers on them in an instant. She was the assistant we all wanted. Roughly fifty years old, memory like a steel trap, polite to a fault, willing to take the heat for the boss, and compulsively organized. There was probably a diary for every day she had worked with the director.

“How long have you been assisting Mr. Thibodaux?”

“Actually, I’ve been here a few more years than he has.” She was blushing, now that the focus of the discussion had moved toher life and actions.

I tried to warm her up by engaging her on a personal level. “Would you mind telling us what your duties are?”

“Certainly, if that will help you with what you need. I came here as a graduate student almost twenty-five years ago. I was planning to spend my career as a museum archivist. That was my training, you see. But Mr. Thibodaux’s predecessor thought the things that made me such a good librarian, if you will, would be helpful to him.”

Chapman called up his childhood image of the beloved school librarian. “Tight lips? That index finger held over your mouth, going ‘ssssssssh’ while I was trying to set up a football game after school with the other guys in the stacks, huh? What else?”

Drexler smiled at his reference. “Well, he certainly appreciated discretion, yes. And my knowledge of the collection. I spent a great deal of time cataloging entries and answering questions from staff and researchers-those who were too lazy to do the work themselves. And then, when Mr. Thibodaux took charge, he was gracious enough to keep me on.”

“When was that?”

The director answered for himself. “Not quite three years ago, Detective. I’m sure you want to know everything about my background as well. Miss Drexler can give you a copy of my curriculum vitae. I’m fifty-two years old, born and raised in Paris. My experience is all curatorial. I ran the European art and sculpture department at the Louvre for more than a decade. Welcomed the opportunity to move to this gem of a museum. My wife was a New Yorker. She very much wanted to come home.”

Eve Drexler heard the knock on the door and went to open it. I recognized the man who had been outside the truck at Newark last night, whom Thibodaux had said was in charge of shipping.

“Come in, Maury.” He rose and greeted the shipping manager, a short, chunky man with a round face and thick red hair.

“Miss Cooper, Mr. Chapman, this is Maury Lissen. He is going to assist you with everything you’ll need from his department.”

Lissen took one of the seats at the table and placed the clipboard he carried in front of him.

“I’ve been up all night going over my paperwork. I just can’t see any way this could have happened here.”

“Yes, but obviously it did, Maury, and we’re going to have to help the police as best we can.”

Chapman stood and reached for the photograph of Katrina Grooten and passed it to Lissen. He winced as he looked at it. “I got a weak stomach for this kind of thing, Detective. Don’t make me look at it, okay?”

Not exactly a response that resonates with a homicide detective. Mike and his partners rarely had the luxury of encountering a body that was not decomposed, or gaping with stab wounds or gunshot holes. “Take a good look, Maury,” he said, sticking the shot back under the guy’s nose. “She can’t bite. She’s dead.”

He wouldn’t pick up the photo but stared down at it and shook his head.

“Know her?”

“Should I? There’s probably no one in this whole museum who has less to do with human beings than I do. Frames, pots, swords, masks, instruments, artworks. I open boxes and close them up. I unpack them and send others off. Pretty young girls I don’t know.”

Chapman repeated her name and still Lissen was flat.

“You have anything to do with the Cloisters?”

“Is that where she worked?”

“Do you?”

“I’m responsible for everything that goes in and out of the place. I’ve got a crew on site to run it, day to day. I don’t spend any time up there myself. Small change compared to what we do here. Go to check on things two or three times a year.”

“This sarcophagus the body was placed in, where’s that been sitting since it got here last fall?”

“We’re trying to track all that for Mr. Thibodaux. You know how much floor space I got downstairs? It covers as much ground as thirty football fields.”

“I thought everything had a number and a tag and a tidy little home.”

“Two out of three, Detective. You gotta give me a few days. Stuff gets moved around all the time down there. We’ll get a handle on this as soon as we can.”

Thibodaux leaned in on his elbows. “Mr. Chapman, I don’t want to make the same mistake as I did earlier and risk insulting you. But there’s a simple fact very few people consider when they come to visit us here-in fact, when they go to any museum in the world.

“The Metropolitan collection includes more thanthree million objects and works of art. Three million. At any given time, the most that is ever on display in these vast halls is less than ten percent of that number. That means we’ve got literally millions of objects stored in our basement.”

He was right about one thing: I had never given any thought to that.

“Some are crated away because there will simply never be any room for them in our galleries and on our walls. Many are inferior and came to us as gifts, which will eventually be traded or sold off. There are hundreds of thousands that are far too fragile to ever be on display, and scores that scholars study, here or on loan at other institutions.”

Chapman and I exchanged glances. Where would we possibly begin?

“I guess we might as well take a look at your territory, Mr. Lissen. Get a sense of how things are organized and stored, what the situation is with your security force-”

“The system is superb, Mr. Chapman,” Thibodaux said. “It has all been upgraded since I arrived here. Every single section of the building has guards, and there are watchmen who patrol the museum all throughout the night, above- and belowground.”

“Surveillance cameras?”

“In the galleries, hallways, storage space, exits, and entrances.”

“Ever turn them on?” Several years before Thibodaux was appointed as director, I had handled the prosecution of a celebrated murder case in which a vibrant teenage girl had been killed by a drugaddicted prep-school dropout on the Great Lawn directly behind the museum. Because of construction that was being done on the rear wing that projected into Central Park, the cameras that would have captured the crime on videotape had been poised to shoot but never loaded with film. It haunted me that no one had been able to prevent the murder, nor had we had been able to reconstruct the crime for the trial jury.

“I-I just assume they’re working.”

Lissen knew the answer, I thought, from the glum look on his face, but was silent. “Is there a problem with the cameras?” I asked him.

“I don’t think anybody’s changed the film in the ones in the basement for more than a year.”

“Like those frigging ATMs,” Chapman said to me. A young uniformed cop had been shot and killed during an ATM stickup that Chapman had once investigated. The gunman looked directly into the camera lens, but the film had been used over again so many times that it had completely deteriorated and displayed only the grainy outline of a bearded face. As a result, the state legislature mandated that banking institutions change their film on a regular basis. No such requirement existed for museums.

“The detective and I would like to begin with you this afternoon, Mr. Lissen. If there’s a telephone I can use first, I’ll notify my boss that we’ve identified the deceased.”

“Of course, Miss Cooper. Please use the one on my desk. I’ll step out to Miss Drexler’s phone and call the gentleman who’s in charge of the Cloisters. He can pull up Miss Grooten’s file.”

I dialed Paul Battaglia’s direct line and hoped Rose Malone would answer. She sounded busy-or distant-and tried to patch me through to the district attorney before getting back on the line to tell me that he wouldn’t pick up my call. That hadn’t happened to me very often.

“Just tell him we think we got an ID. The deceased is Katrina Grooten, and she was working up at the Cloisters, on a special joint project that involved a few of the museums. ME thinks the cause of death is poisoning. Soon as I know any more you’ll have it.”

I handed the receiver to Chapman and moved out of his way. “Hey, loo. Got a tentative make on Saint Cleo. Some kind of art maven working in one of the museums. From South Africa, here on a visa. Coop and I’ll pop up to the Cloisters tomorrow, when we’re done in this joint, see if anyone knows why or when she quit her job.”

He put the phone down and picked up a photograph from Thibodaux’s desk. The handsome woman in the eight-by-ten frame was smiling back at him, dressed to the nines and standing in front of the glass pyramid in the courtyard at the Louvre.

“Mrs. T.?”

Eve Drexler nodded.

“She have anything to do with the museum, officially?”

“No, Mr. Chapman. She’s dead. Killed in a ski accident at Chamonix, winter before last. They had only been here at the Met for little more than a year. I was right here in the office with Pierre when he got-”

Drexler stopped talking when Thibodaux opened the door and reentered the room. “Hiram Bellinger, the director of the Cloisters, will see you anytime tomorrow that suits you. He didn’t know Miss Grooten well, but he’ll pull her file and be prepared to give you whatever you need.”

Chapman turned his back to the director and whispered to me, “Let’s get a gander at the setup here this afternoon, meet at the morgue in the morning to see what Kestenbaum has for us, then spend as much time as we need uptown, talking to the people she worked with.”

“Fine with me.”

He walked back to the conference table to pick up his steno pad. “Tell Bellinger we’ll be there about twelve tomorrow. Hasn’t he got anything he can fax over to you now?”

“The basic personnel records should be in the database, even if the entire file is archived. I expect he’ll have her address and date of birth over to me shortly. What else would you like?”

“Next of kin would be nice. I’d hate for them to find out about this on CNN. Maybe she has family here who can help us out.”

“How thoughtless of me. Why don’t you start downstairs with Maury, and Miss Drexler will find you as soon as the information comes in.”

“Did he say there was anything strange about Ms. Grooten’s disappearance?”

“Nothing at all, Detective. He said he remembered that there was a letter of resignation from late last December that he put in the file. You two should be able to track this down better than we can: Bellinger said that Katrina had been planning to leave the city for some time, ever since she’d been assaulted-how do you say, violated?-in that park up at the Cloisters after leaving the museum late one night. She’d never been quite the same after that.”