The Bone Vault

16

“What’s the extension for the office of the museum president?”

The guard tugged at the top drawer and shuffled the papers to find the directory. This was not a man who spent a lot of time dealing with the executive wing.

He handed the receiver to Mike, who dialed the number, then said, “I’d like to speak with”-he turned to the front page and looked at the list of names-“President Raspen?”

“Sorry to be holding you up,” I said to the guard, who kept looking at the time. He was ready to close up shop and go home.

“Oh, yeah? For how long?” Mike didn’t like the response he got.

“Well, who’s in charge? Can you put him on?” Another bad answer. “Eleven tomorrow morning? Fine, just tell him to expect me when he gets in. Michael Chapman, NYPD.” And hereally didn’t appreciate whatever was said next. “No, but if you mention the wordhomicide, he might find he has a spare moment or two to squeeze me in.”

He turned to me. “President Raspen’s off ogling turtles in the Galápagos. Gone for a week with a tribe of donors. Those poor critters will probably be hanging from a giant sky hook next to that friggin‘ fiberglass whale that’s been down the hall here since I first walked in the door.”

“Who’ll be hanging, the donors or the turtles?”

“The donors have a shot at immortality. They just plaster their names all over a wing or an auditorium or a species of lizard. It’s the lousy turtles who get screwed every time.”

“Who are we going to be talking to in the morning?”

Mike looked at the name he had scribbled on a piece of paper. “Elijah Mamdouba. Vice president in charge of curatorial affairs. He’s got a full schedule, but he’ll try to see us. The routine bureaucratic hand job.”

We made our way back through the quiet hallways and were escorted out by another guard. Mike squared the block in his car, then headed east through Central Park at Eighty-first Street.

“Drop me at Grace’s Marketplace. I’ll get some hors d’oeuvres and meet you in the lobby of my building.” I got out of the car at the corner of Seventy-first Street and bought an assortment of cheeses and pâtés to hold us until dinner. Mike and Mercer were chatting with the two doormen when I got home. Mercer took the shopping bag from my hand, and I pressed the elevator button for the twentieth floor. “How’s Vickee feeling?”

“Tired, cranky, excited. Went to the doctor this afternoon and she said we’re about two weeks away from the delivery. First baby, may be a few days late.”

“How can you concentrate on anything? This new little life coming along…”

“Yeah,” Mike said, leaning back against the wall of the elevator. “Our first kid.”

Mercer beamed.

“At least for the time being it is. Can’t seem to get blondie here interested in the how-to’s of making one of those things. I remember being at the Natural History Museum once, must have been fourteen or fifteen years old. They had these beetles, they were called feather wings. The whole friggin‘ species was female. Reproduced without any fertilization by a male. I’m gonna check tomorrow and see if they still have any of those bugs around. Must be the way Coop plans on doing it.”

Mercer tried to get me off the hook. “I think Jake’s got the program under control.”

I reached into my bag to get the keys and unlock the door. Mike kept talking. “One minute the man’s in Washington, next day he’s in Jerusalem or Hong Kong or Moscow. How can he score any action from long distance? Now it’s getting worse, ‘cause Ms. Cooper here is trying to depriveme of a little tender loving care.”

“Female bonding in the country.” I smiled at Mercer. “Nina Baum arranged to come on this business trip with her boss so she could stay east for Memorial Day weekend and go up to Martha’s Vineyard with me. I’ve invited Val to come with us, too,” I said, referring to Mike’s girlfriend. “Food, wine, massages, beach walks, girl talk all night. No testosterone.” I flipped on the light switch and dropped my things on the ottoman in my living room. “I’ll get the ice.”

“You think people don’t wonder why you like being in charge of sex crimes prosecutions? You should hear the crap people ask me about you. ‘Is it because she hates men?’ ‘You figure she thinks about it when she’s in the sack with a guy?’ or ‘You think it turns her on to listen to those stories all day?’”

I walked from the kitchen to the den, carrying a bucket of cubes. “I can’t even begin to imagine the clever answers you dream up to amuse them.”

“I used to shut a bunch of ‘em up by telling them we lived together, but then they began to look at me likeI had some kind of problem, too, so I quit with that line.”

Mercer poured the drinks while I went to my bedroom to change into casual clothes. When I reentered the room, he was telling Mike what he learned at his hospital interviews after leaving us at the Cloisters, the television muted in the background. This would be an easy case to prove, despite the victim’s inability to testify, because the nurse had witnessed the assault. It would just be a matter of tracking down the assailant, and then helping a jury to understand why an incontinent ninety-year-old bed patient had been the object of someone’s sexual appetite-or rage.

I picked up the phone and dialed Hal Sherman’s cell number, letting it ring until the crime scene specialist answered the call. “Catch you at a bad time?”

“Bad for who? Me or the dead guy?”

“Where are you?”

“Not Chapman’s beat, Alex, if that’s who you’re looking for. Manhattan South. Some poor schmuck from the ‘burbs picked up a hooker in his wife’s new Beemer for one last fling before the long weekend. Must have been quite an argument. Five stab wounds to the chest.”

“Who’s wailing like that?”

“The widow. Not because she’s in mourning. She’s screaming like a banshee because the chief of D’s won’t release the car to her. ‘But it’smine, ’ she keeps saying. ‘It’s registered inmy name.’ Kind of lost sight of the fact that it’s the murder scene. I’m wrapping up. What do you need?”

“Mike’s with me. Just want to know if you’ve had a chance to do blow-ups of the photos you took for us in the truck Wednesday morning.”

“I’ll have them on your desk tomorrow. Came out great.”

“Could you make out any designs on the sarcophagus?”

“Like hieroglyphics?”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, it’s covered with them. It’s carved all over the place.”

“Any symbols you remember? I didn’t get close enough to see when I was up on the truck.”

“You must be kidding. I just take the pictures. I don’t airbrush out the bloodstains or bullet holes, and I don’t do translations.”

“I mean, was it all writing, or are there any figures on it, too?”

“Loads of little Egyptians.”

“Any animals?”

“More than they got inThe Lion King. All kinds of monkeys, enough cats to make my allergies act up, rams and lambs, ducks and falcons and-”

“Great. Thanks for coming out on this one. I owe you.”

“I’ll add that to Chapman’s list. I could be a very rich man some day if you clowns pay up.”

Mike clicked on the TV volume as I hung up. “Hal says there are a lot of animal symbols on Katrina’s sarcophagus.”

“I could have told you that. I was right on top of it with the flashlight. Sssssh.”

Alex Trebek had just told us that tonight’s Final Jeopardy! category was “Greatest Hits.”

“Everybody in for twenty?”

“I wish youhad told me that. It means the coffin could easily have been designated as part of the exhibition. Katrina could have been studying it up at the Cloisters, or it could have been on site at the Museum of Natural History.”

“Obviously. ‘According to ASCAP, this song has been played on American radio stations more times than any other hit.’ Mike was doing his Trebek imitation. ”What’s your question, Coop? How about you, Mr. Motown?“

Mercer held his arm out straight, palm forward. “I’m guessing The Supremes, early. ‘Stop, in the Name of Love.’”

“We’re going to be all over the map with this two-ton sarcophagus. How is that possible?” I couldn’t fathom that something as large and heavy as the ancient coffin could be so difficult to keep track of. “It’s gotta be something Sinatra. ‘Strangers in the Night’?”

“Exactly what I mean, Coop. There’s a lot of people would read a personal clue into the answer you just gave. Strangers in the night, one-night stands. Too much sex on the brain. Me? I’m going with Elvis. ‘Love Me Tender.’ ‘What is…?’ of course.”

“I’m sorry, ladies,” Trebek feigned dismay at their three wrong questions. “And that brings our Campus Winners Week to an end. The correct answer would be, What is the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling‘?”

Mike zapped off the television set, as Mercer sang, “‘Now it’s gone, gone, gone…’ Can’t believe that blue-eyed soul gets all that airtime.”

“Game plan. I can see we’re not going to get treated to any dinner here tonight. You’ve got two mouths to feed at home, Val’s waiting for me to take her to a movie, and the blonde’s still got murder on her mind. What assignments you giving out? Anything I have to do before I get to your office in the morning?”

“While you’re pining away for Val and me this weekend, you might check out Bellinger’s story. Speak to his wife, confirm the dates they were out of town in December, get a feel for what she thought the relationship was between her husband and his protégée.”

“I’m also going to try to get my hands on anything else Katrina might have signed. It’s curious that Bellinger’s gut reaction was that might not have been her handwriting on the resignation she submitted.”

I didn’t have to tell Mike what to do in the course of any difficult investigation, but it helped for us to split the duties between us. He went on, “I’ll try to check out these museum documents and see if they help us pin down exactly where she spent her time between June and December, and why she would have been in close proximity to the sarcophagus.”

“I’ll copy the personal e-mails tomorrow and take them with me to the Vineyard. I’d like to see what she was telling her friends about her health and her job, and her decision to go back to South Africa.” I reached for the telephone and got it on the second ring.

“Hey, Joe, got anything?” It was the detective from the DA’s squad who was going to order the dump of my office phone to see where my old stalker, Shirley Denzig, had been calling from. I turned my back on Mike and Mercer, hoping they wouldn’t pick up on my recurring problem as they talked with each other about the weekend.

I listened as Joe told me that because of the holiday, and the fact that the harassing calls were coming in to a trunk line-the central telephone operations center of the district attorney’s office, with hundreds of individual extensions-the phone company might not be able to have results for me until early next week.

“That’s fine. I’m skipping town tomorrow. Taking some friends and going to the country.”

“You won’t be alone?” he asked. “And you promise you won’t be in the city?”

“You’ve got my number on the Vineyard. Call if you get any news.”

I hung up and walked the guys to the door, just as Jake opened it with his key. I relieved him of the shopping bag that held whatever he was going to cook for dinner, and let him greet Mike and Mercer, whom he had not seen in several weeks.

“Plenty of food. I’m cooking some fettuccine for the overworked prosecutor tonight. Any takers?”

“Gotta run. You booted out for the weekend, too?”

“For the long haul. I leave on Saturday for the defense secretary’s mission to Australia and Southeast Asia. Nine days.”

“Mercer and I’ll watch out for the little princess. Be good to her tonight. Maybe she’ll tell you about the other body we found today, stuffed in a suit of armor at the Met. That’s got to be the most dangerous place in town.”

Jake’s head snapped around to make eye contact with me as Mike pulled the door shut behind him. “Is he-?”

I stretched my arms around his neck and clucked at his gullibility, kissing him on the tip of his nose. “He’s just baiting you. No more bodies. No progress on Katrina.”

“I guess he really believes that I was your leak. Maybe I can buy back a bit of goodwill.”

“Have you solved the case for us? That would be a good start.” I was sorting through the wine cabinet to find a serious bottle of red to go with our dinner.

“There was a voice mail in my office late today. Must have come in while I was taping the piece I did for the evening news. Remember the woman who attached herself to me on Tuesday, while you and Nina were talking?”

“That good-looking old girl with the silver-rinse hair job?”

“Ruth Gerst. Museum trustee. She asked if I had any well-connected sources in the NYPD. She wants to give them some information about Pierre Thibodaux.”