The Bone Vault

20

Zimm lifted the lid on the heavy metal casket. “Stand back. The smell of the alcohol can knock you off your feet.”

He was right. My head jerked away and I was reminded of the overwhelming stench of formaldehyde that had been so pervasive when I viewed my first autopsies at the medical examiner’s office as part of my training for homicide investigations.

I covered my mouth with one hand and rested the other on the end of the case. Mike and I stared in at the behemoth, whose single glassy eye gazed back at us. Zimm reached into the murky fluid and lifted up the head of the coelacanth for us to admire. The fish was larger than the body of Katrina Grooten.

Mike was more interested in the container than the fish. “What’s this?” he asked, tapping on the inside.

“It’s completely lined with stainless steel. You couldn’t have odors like this escaping into the room for very long, and still have people working around here, could you?”

“You’d lose me at the end of a day. How many of these have they got?” Mike helped lower the lid into place.

“Maybe four. Maybe six. I’ll ask my friend next week.”

“Where are the rest of them?”

Zimm shrugged his shoulders. “This is the only one that’s got a permanent resident. They move the others around as needed.”

We had walked through most of the department and had not seen any similar coffinlike vats. “They’re certainly not small enough to conceal.”

“People don’t hide them intentionally. There are endless numbers of small offices in which the research is done. Some are probably tucked away in corners of those rooms, and others are in storage areas. Believe me, Ms. Cooper, you’d need an army to go through this place from top to bottom to figure out everything that we’ve got in here. And Mr. Mamdouba isn’t about to let that happen.”

“Those other friends of Katrina’s you mentioned, can you take us to meet them?”

“I’m not really sure who’s in today.” He hesitated, and I thought he was afraid to make trouble for any other graduate students.

“We’re just trying to talk to people who might have known she was in distress. People whom she may have confided in about her return home to South Africa.”

“I wasn’t kidding about her friend, the one who left. I didn’t know her by name. Only by sight. I just know she was an anthropologist who was asked to resign and-”

“Fired?”

“Yeah. That’s why she’s in London now.”

“What do you have to do to get fired from a natural history museum?”

“Steal things would be the easiest. But that wasn’t her problem,” Zimm said. “Rumor was she crossed someone in administration.”

“Mamdouba?”

“No, but he’d certainly know the story.”

Mike looked at his notes. “And the African peoples connection?”

“They’re up on the second floor. I can take you up there. Maybe I’ll recognize her pals.”

We trekked again, up the stairs and out into the public space, past North American forests and through the Hall of Biodiversity, among the birds of the world, and into the African Peoples hall.

Zimm asked the guard if he knew where any of the interns were, but the man just shook his head.

My beeper began to vibrate as I stood before a photo exhibit of an early African expedition. “Cell phones work up here?”

“Not in the basement, and not in most interior areas like this. Better walk back to the birds.”

I checked Ryan Blackmer’s number and returned his call. “I’ve been trying to page you for half an hour. Black hole?”

“Yeah, sorry. These museum foundations are too thick in places. What’d I miss?”

“The meet with the Internet pedophile that we had set for three o’clock today? The perp canceled.”

“You think he smells something?”

“Nah. Wants to do it Monday. Sounds like he just couldn’t get into town early enough. I didn’t want you hanging around the museum for no reason. And Sarah said to tell you one other thing. We’re on the lookout for a chaperone from a company the Maury Povich show uses.”

“What for?”

“The producer brought in a bunch of wild-child types for a show called ‘Uncontrollable Teens.’ Would it surprise you to know that after the taping, a spunky fifteen-year-old from Hemp Hill, Texas, took off with the chaperone? Last seen giving him a blow job in the backseat of the stretch limo, parked right in front of the hotel where they were waiting to pick up her mother. Wire services have it.”

“How’d they get it?”

“Mother gave it out. She’s looking to sue the show.”

“Where the hell was she while the kid was on the loose?”

“Back in the hotel room with a guy she picked up at a bar the night before. Must be a genetic thing.”

“We’re almost done here. If I don’t have to wait for your sting to go down, we’ve got another witness to interview,” I said, thinking of Ruth Gerst, the Met trustee.

Our eager guide took us through many of the back corridors and unpeopled areas of the museum before we left: hallway after darkened hallway filled with cases of forgotten bird displays, rows of unmarked lockers, and blocks of empty containers covered over with thick layers of plastic tarp. By the time he walked us out the door, it was close to three o’clock.

Zimm had known nothing about arsenic sources within the museum, since his department did not use any in their work, but he was now alert to endless ideas about how to dispose of a body within the vast network of buildings.

On our way east to the Gerst apartment on Park Avenue, Mike and I stopped for a sandwich and cold drink. He called the ME’s office and left a message on Dr. Kestenbaum’s voice mail. If there was anything on Katrina’s body or clothing that indicated a need for DNA analysis, the profiles of the Natural History staff were on record. He also suggested testing the linen cloths in which the body had been wrapped for some natural oil substance that might have been used in an attempt to suppress odors.

The doorman admitted us to one of the toniest buildings on Park Avenue, just north of Seventieth Street. Mrs. Gerst answered the door herself. “Come in, darlings. Ruth Gerst. You’re Miss Cooper and Mr. Chapman. Come right in.”

She looked as though she had just returned from an elegant luncheon. She was a large woman whom I guessed to be in her eighties, dressed in a light tweed walking suit, perfectly coiffed, and wearing enough jewelry to sink a rowboat.

She ushered us into a sitting room off the main living area. The furniture was covered in a luxe silk fabric, and the walls were hung with an assortment of small paintings, each undoubtedly as valuable as the emerald-cut diamond ring that tried to balance itself atop Gerst’s gnarled finger.

“You’re Jake Tyler’s girl, is that right?”

I answered her politely, while Mike stifled a laugh. “Yes, ma’am. Alexandra Cooper.”

“I hope I didn’t smother him the other night, at the Met, with all my attention and questions. You shouldn’t let a good-looking fellow out around town by himself.”

“What am I, chopped liver? You available, Mrs. Gerst?”

“That’s the spirit, son. I’ve been available for way too long. Eighty-six, I am now. Think you can handle me? Been a widow almost thirty years. But let me get right to the point. I’ve been involved with the Metropolitan Museum for an awfully long time. Seen directors come and go. Scandals, too. I read about this young lady’s death and I’ve been terribly concerned.”

Ruth Gerst pushed herself up off her armchair and walked to a small wet bar in an alcove against the far corner of the room. “Can I fix you a drink?”

We both said no, and watched as she poured herself a neat shot of bourbon.

“You have something you want to tell us about Pierre Thibodaux?”

“Goodness, no. I see the newspapers could hardly wait a minute before they started damning him about the girl’s murder. You need to know something about the politics of the place, and who’s out to get him. I thought I could help.”

“Have you been affiliated with the Met for a very long time?”

“My dear, my father was a trustee. In 1925, he gave his first million. Old banking family. His father came to this country in the 1880s. You can’t begin to imagine how this whole business has changed over time. Gaylord and Bellinger, pointing fingers at Pierre? Curators used to know their place in the old days.”

I knew Bellinger was not a fan of the director’s but I wasn’t aware of any public finger-pointing, yet. “Really?”

Mrs. Gerst picked up on her own story. “In my father’s day? The curators at the Met weren’t even allowed to sit when they made a presentation before the trustees of the purchasing committee. They came into the meeting, described their research on a piece, and they left. As it should be. Each of the trustees’ wives was expected to donate evening gowns from her own wardrobe, after the season, to the wives of the curators so they could make a respectable appearance at museum events.

“I remember the year I went off to college, I howled when I learned Mother had given a strand of her South Sea pearls to the Greek and Roman curator’s wife, along with a couple of Chanel gowns. It’s a different world now. Very high and mighty they are.”

“Why do you think Hiram Bellinger didn’t get along with Pierre? Style? The quiet scholar versus the showman at the helm?”

“Hiram’s just a crybaby. No matter how much money we poured into acquisitions for him and the Cloisters, he’s never been satisfied. He embarrassed Pierre terribly with that purchase of the tapestries that he claimed were from the Gobelins’ workshops. We gave him a fortune to complete the deal. He gets them here, to be restored at the textile laboratory at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and it turns out they had an entirely different provenance. Weren’t worth the price of the plane ride to America.”

I glanced down at my watch. Gerst’s gossip was interesting but hardly going anywhere.

She rested her glass on a side table and looked at Mike. “What I wanted to know is whether anybody told you about the vaults.”

“Vaults?” I looked at Mike and he shook his head from side to side.

“I should have figured. There aren’t many people around from the early days. It’s quite possible Pierre doesn’t even know about their existence.”

Mrs. Gerst lifted her glass to her lips and took several sips of the bourbon.

“This goes back almost fifty years, when there were some very lean times at the museum. There was a trustee named Arthur Paglin, who had a mediocre personal collection, but an awful lot of money. The director at the time was after him to make a donation that would enable a massive renovation of what was then called the Great Hall. The man knew how to drive a deal like the devil.”

“What did he do?”

“He agreed to donate the money. But he had two conditions. The first was that the Met sell to him most of their collection of Egyptian art-which they’d bought many years earlier-at the original prices.”

“Why do that?”

“So he could bequeath the objects back to the Met, and this time they would all bear the designation ‘Gifts of Arthur Paglin’ in perpetuity. He’d get the credit for having put together the collection, and a brilliant tax deduction as well. Worth far more than the cost of the art at the 1930s prices.”

“And the second condition?”

“He demanded a storeroom in the basement of the museum. A private vault. He wanted a storage space that only he and his personal curator could access. Rent-free.”

“And they gave it to him?”

“With great reluctance. Imagine, to other collectors, the value of having this perfectly secure vault right inside the Met, without having to pay for any of it.”

“Why did they go along with it?”

“Because the museum director wanted its contents eventually. Subsequent directors courted Paglin for the rest of his life, without even knowing what treasures were inside the room.”

“How’d they do?”

“Chacun à son goût,Detective. My husband used to say that the tax scheme had more value than anything Paglin had the taste to collect. There were some great pieces, but he’d been taken to the cleaners as often as the rest of us.”

“And this vault, this was common knowledge at the time?” I could neither remember reading about it nor hearing of it before today.

“Commonwould be the right word for it. Mr. Paglin and my father had similar taste in one regard: they shared a mistress. Just for a year or two, but long enough for her to see the splendors of the vault and tell my father about it. I don’t think many other people were aware of it. Starts that whole ‘mine is bigger than yours is’ thing. Men are such babies about that, don’t you find?”

“Do you know how many private vaults there are in the museum?”

“I have no idea. But Timothy Gaylord would be a good place to start. Anyone who’s involved in our Egyptian collection, even today, would know the Paglin story. I’d bet Timothy was working in the Egyptian department as a curatorial apprentice at the time of Paglin’s death. The old boy lived well into his nineties, like I’m hoping to do. Cheers!”

Mike turned to me. “Wonder if they have anything similar at Natural History. Private vaults, I mean.” We were both thinking, like Ruth Gerst, that a vault would be a great place to hide a sarcophagus.

“Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“How familiar are you withthat museum?”

“Herbert was on their board.”

“Herbert?”

“My late husband. Refused to have anything to do with the Met because my father was such a strong presence there. Loved the romance and excitement of exploration. Have you met Erik Poste yet? European paintings?”

“Only briefly.”

“His father, Willem, was one of the great adventurers of the last century. Right out of Hemingway, my dear girl. Fearless, handsome, sexy. Took Herbert to Africa with him on many of his trips. I think my Herbie was the only one, in those days, who had no stomach for the hunt, no desire to kill the magnificent beasts. Never got caught up in that.”

“What were your husband’s interests?”

“In Africa? Anything that wasn’t nailed down. After those early trips with Willem, my husband brought back every fossil he could find. Reptiles, tortoises, mammals. As long as someone else had done the shooting. The man just loved his bones. Believe me, if they’d had any private vaults in that museum, Herb would have finagled one for himself. Ask Erik Poste. He’d know. He lived with all those tales.”

“Well, where did they store the bones?”

“My boy, they’ve got an elephant room in the attic, a boar closet somewhere else, lizard vertebrae in herpetology. Do you know how many bones they’ve got in that place, scattered everywhere? Fifty million of them. Now what the hell for?”

“Well, what exactly did your husband want with them?”

“Same thing those others wanted: immortality. J. P. Morgan gets a hall of gems named after him, for giving the museum the Star of India. Gertrude Whitney gave birds-enough of them to give Hitchcock the creeps-and she’s got a hall of her own, too. Herbie? They never quite figured out what to do with all his bones. Couldn’t possibly display them in one place, because they cross over into too many departments. So they just sit there collecting dust.”

Gerst hoisted her glass again, drained it, and walked briskly to the bar for a refill. She turned to look at Mike as she spoke. “I met that girl once, you know. The dead one.”

“Katrina Grooten?”

“Yes. I’ve got a good mind for faces. They showed a photo of her, from the Cloisters, on the morning news. Sweet-looking young thing.”

“At the Met?”

“No, no. At the Louvre. There was a search committee made up of some trustees, when we invited Pierre to take the position with us. After he accepted, a few of us flew over to Paris, and they held a reception for him at the Louvre.”

She walked to her chair and steadied herself on one of its arms as she sat down. “I’ll have to ask him if it’s the same girl. I remember chatting with her about the small museum she apprenticed in, in Toulouse, I think.”

“Musée des Augustins?”

“That’s it. My husband and I had been there a few years earlier, so I was intrigued to hear about her scholarship. When did the Grooten girl come to work at the Cloisters?”

Around the same time-almost three years ago-that Pierre Thibodaux accepted the directorship of the Met. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he was mentoring her,” Gerst said.

“We’ll have to ask Ms. Drexler about that.”

“Eve? I call her ‘Evil.’ I wouldn’t ask her anything about another woman.” Mrs. Gerst had a rowdy twinkle in her eye and a quick smile. “She’d have put a knife in the girl’s back if Katrina had been getting too close to Pierre.”