Still As Death (23 page)

Sweeney wrote that down. “Did you know about the robbery at the museum?”

“Oh, yeah, everyone knew. Karen was a bit of a celebrity on campus after that. I mean, to a bunch of college students from the suburbs, getting tied up during the commission of a major art heist was pretty wild stuff. Karen hated talking about it, though. When people asked her about it, what it had been like, she just said she didn’t remember much about it. It was a kind of thing with her. It was almost like it embarrassed her in some way.”

“You say you didn’t think there was a reason for her suicide, that she was just depressed. You’re sure she never said anything to any of you? She hadn’t been dumped by a boyfriend, anything like that?”

“Karen didn’t have any boyfriends as far as I know. And she had gotten pretty militant toward the end of that year, going on about how all heterosexual relationships were a kind of slavery. She wasn’t a lesbian. She had had some relationships with men. But something had happened to turn her off of dating. Oh, and she had gotten upset about some of the things going on at the museum too. I remember that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she had gone to Egypt, on a study trip, the summer before our senior year, and I guess she saw some things that really bothered
her. My family’s Chinese, and she told me that all of our great treasures were in American museums instead of Chinese ones and wasn’t that a crime? She said that visiting the museum in Cairo had made her so depressed because they couldn’t even afford to properly display their own history because so many of their most valuable items had been stolen by Westerners. White men, she said, white men in sun hats. I remember her saying that so vividly.”

“Was there a specific piece that she was angry about?” Sweeney was thinking about the collar. If Karen had discovered that the collar had been illegally taken out of Egypt, maybe that’s what she’d been so angry about.

“I don’t think so. I think it was the idea of it. Something happened to her when she was in Egypt. She got radicalized.” Felicia hesitated, then asked, “I have to get going in a couple of minutes. Was there anything else?”

“Just one more question. What did the WAWAs do?”

Felicia laughed. “The name sounds kind of silly now, doesn’t it? At the time, it was very important to us, you know, we weren’t just angry like all the feminists who had come before us, we were going to actually
do
something about it. We had rallies for ERA and we did a lot of yelling about the number of women faculty on campus. I don’t know how old you are, but the late seventies and early eighties were a strange time to be a young woman. We’d won in so many respects. We were on campus. In theory, we could be anything we wanted to be, we could sleep with anyone we wanted to sleep with, but the place where things hadn’t changed a lot was in the way that men thought of you. It’s hard to explain. I knew so many women who had been forced into things they didn’t want to do, date rape we’d say now, but they literally didn’t know how to say no. We weren’t prepared, you see. We’d been given all this freedom and we weren’t ready for it. Anyway, you should call Susan. She knew Karen better than anyone.” Felicia Hu gave Sweeney a Chicago number and asked her to pass on her best. “We had a reunion a few years ago. All the WAWAs. It was interesting to see what everyone had
done with her life. Susan became an academic. I’m a lawyer. There are a good few of us lawyers. Angie Bellini became a Unitarian minister. Do you know Jeanne Olsen? Ortiz I guess she is now? I think she’s teaching at the university too.”

“Yeah, I know Jeanne well.”

“She was around a lot too in those days. She went to Smith, but we always kidded her that with no men around, there wasn’t enough for her to be mad about so she had to come and create trouble here. She was a sort of unofficial member of the WAWAs. I’ve got to go, but call Susan.”

Sweeney thanked her for her time and hung up the phone.

She turned on one of the six fans she and Ian had placed throughout the apartment and drained her beer, pressing the empty bottle against the back of her neck, then dialed Susan Esterhaus’s number in her office at the University of Chicago. When she answered, Sweeney identified herself and told her what she wanted to know.

“That’s a coincidence,” Susan Esterhaus said. “I can’t talk now. I have about a thousand things to do because I’m flying to Boston tomorrow. I’ll be at the university on Saturday, speaking at a rally Jeanne Ortiz is helping to organize. Why don’t you come and we can talk there?” Sweeney told her that sounded good. “Karen wasn’t the real thing,” Susan Esterhaus added, as an afterthought. “Not a real radical, I mean. But I liked her just the same.”

HER INQUIRIES AT A STANDSTILL until the rally, Sweeney decided to go back to the museum to finish cleaning up the copious paperwork connected with the exhibition. She boxed up her files and was heading down the stairs to the main floor of the museum when she saw Quinn coming up in the opposite direction.

He was so out of context here that it took her a moment to recognize him. “Hey. What are you doing here?”

“Talking to some people. Going over the crime scene.” He grinned, happy to see her.

“Oh, yeah? Where are you going now?”

“Actually,” he said, “you caught me. I was going to look at your exhibit. I was kinda curious about what funerary art looks like. I know all about your gravestones, but …”

“You want me to go with you?” She’d been looking forward to getting home and back in front of the fans, but it would be fun to show him around.

“Sure. You can give me the official tour. Unless you have to get home or anything.”

“No, I’d love to show you.”

They went back up to the third-floor galleries. “It’s really strange having the place so empty,” she said.

“How long will the show be up? You got kind of a raw deal out of this whole thing, didn’t you?”

“They’ll keep it up until January probably. Willem’s being good about that. Do you think you’ll let us reopen by then?”

“Oh, yeah, we should be finishing up pretty soon. We need to make sure we haven’t missed anything, and the university wants to be sure the security system is adequate.”

“I bet Willem won’t have any trouble getting the money he wanted for a security upgrade now.”

“Had he been turned down for the money?” Quinn had guessed it from his conversation with Rick Torrance and George Fellows about museum security.

“Oh, yeah. I’d heard that much through the grapevine. But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a director of a college or university art museum who didn’t get his dream budget turned down every year. It’s always a balance between what could be and what’s possible. My department chairman said that to me once when I asked for money for a research project.”

“I asked my FBI contact about Karen Philips,” he said suddenly. “He said he did interview her. She was working near the storage area when the theft occurred, and he said she seemed scared.”

“Really?” Sweeney turned to look at him. He was grinning.

“Are you going to say you told me so?”

“I never say that. Although …” They laughed.

“Can I ask you something? You have to keep it confidential.” She nodded. “Have you ever heard anything around the museum about someone named Arthur Maloof?”

Sweeney stared at him. “Yeah. He donated the collar to the museum—along with some of Willem’s best pieces—and a friend of Ian’s said she thinks there was something fishy about him.” She told him about her conversation with Aggie Williams.

“His donations are being investigated. I guess the Egyptian government
and the FBI think some of the pieces in his collection were taken out illegally.”

“I don’t understand it,” Sweeney told him, thinking out loud. “The falcon collar was incorrectly identified. Was it a mistake, or did someone do it on purpose in order to make it easier to steal? But why would Maloof have done that? Was he trying to hide the fact that it had a suspicious provenance?”

They’d reached the top of the stairs. “ ‘Still as Death,’ ” Quinn said, reading the black letters over the entrance. “So this is it.”

“Yeah. This is what I’ve been doing for the last three years of my life.” It had been so busy the night of the opening that she hadn’t really had a chance to see the whole effect of the installations. Now, looking around at the walls, she realized it was perfect. The black and cream color scheme she’d chosen for the galleries was a nice complement to the dark cabinets and framed photographs, and the square labels with their scrolled titles fit the feel of the exhibit perfectly.

He looked carefully at the sarcophagi and unguent jars, the small canopic jars she’d included in the exhibit, reading the explanations about how the Egyptians had prepared their dead for entombment. She watched as he took it all in, wandering from room to room.

“Are all these people really dead?” They’d come to the postmortem photographs, and he wandered silently, stopping to read the little cards below each one.

“Yeah. It was very common. People kept them as a memento of the person who had died.”

“It’s awful,” he said. “All these children.”

She stood next to him, their shoulders almost touching. “I know. I had a hard time working on that part of it.”

“Megan,” he said. He didn’t need to explain. “I couldn’t stand it.”

Sweeney looked up at the photograph in front of them. The girl in it couldn’t be more than four or five. “I thought about Megan when I was … As I said, I had a hard time choosing the ones of children.”

“Yeah?” He glanced at her and stepped closer, so that their shoulders
were touching again, and they stood in silence for a few minutes staring at the photographs. In the glare from the glass, she caught their reflection, the two tall forms, her long curly hair forming an indeterminate halo around her head, his short hair making his skull seem blocky and strange. She had a sudden sense of their oppositeness, the male and female qualities of them, the way they seemed polar bookends in the reflecting glass. She wanted to tell him this, wanted to express something to him that she had suddenly realized, but she was struck dumb.

The space between them was charged with energy. She could feel the warmth of his body passing through his shoulder and into her skin. Then he moved ever so slightly, shifting from one foot to the other, and the energy changed, dissipated.

He walked across the room, leaving her standing in front of a cast of a 1720s gravestone. “So, Ian seems like a nice guy,” he called back over his shoulder.

“He is.” She bent down to pick up a blank piece of notepaper from the floor, crumpling it and putting it in her pocket. “Better than I deserve.”

“Oh, come on,” he said lightly. “You deserve the best.” She felt as though she’d set him up to say it and she jumped in so he wouldn’t think she had.

“No, I mean, I think it’s just that … in a way, I don’t feel like I’m ready to be in a really serious relationship, you know? But that’s ridiculous. It’s been almost three years now since Colm died, and I should be moving on. I guess I am moving on.”

“You are living with someone.”

She laughed. “I guess I am. I just don’t know about this whole London thing.”

“Can’t he stay here?”

“No. He has a daughter in Paris, and he hasn’t been seeing enough of her since he’s been over here. He’s got the office here up and going, so his job is over there. And I should really be thinking about what I’m going to do next. My building is going to be sold and
I haven’t even told him yet. I don’t know why. It’s like I want things to just stay the same, you know what I mean?”

He was looking at her with an expression on his face that she couldn’t quite read.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I do. I haven’t wanted things to stay the same a lot lately. I want to move on, I want to get over Maura’s death. I just can’t seem to do it.”

“Have you ever thought about … you know. Dating. Marrying again? I don’t know, sleeping with someone?” She had meant it to sound jokey, but suddenly the air between them was charged again.

In the gallery lights, his face was all angles and his hair blended into the color of his face so that he looked like a stone statue. He turned and said quickly, “Yes,” and then he was gone, into the next room, leaving Sweeney standing there, listening to his voice come back toward her saying, “I have to get going. I left a notebook in the basement.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll come down with you.” She joined him in the hallway, but they didn’t look at each other as they went down the stairs.

The basement was in shadow, the Egyptian exhibits spookily illuminated along the walls, the stone pillars creating strange little pools of darkness. The potted trees in the center of the courtyard almost looked like a real forest, the leaves casting odd animal shapes onto the pale marble.

“Careful,” Quinn said, catching her arm as she stumbled at the bottom of the stairs.

“Thanks.” She felt the hot skin of his forearm against her hand. He stopped suddenly. And in the instant she turned to look up at him to see why, she knew two things. One was that she wanted to kiss him, the other was that something was wrong. It was pure déjà vu, the room, the look on Quinn’s face mirroring the shock she’d seen on Jeanne’s face, and she followed the direction of his gaze.

There was someone on the floor, in almost the exact center of the room. They stood there for a moment, just staring at the body, as
though they didn’t know what it was, and then Quinn whispered, “It’s Willem Keane,” and he was moving across the room. Sweeney turned to see him crouching by the body, and she crossed the room too and knelt down next to him, taking in the details. It was as though she was seeing the whole thing again, Olga’s body and the blood, except that this time it was Willem and the blood was on his mouth, on his cheeks, on the floor, and she thought of Macbeth. Who would have known? So much blood. And she thought,
All of us, all of us have this much blood
. And then,
We are all this close to death
.

QUINN AND ELLIE STOOD IN FRONT of one of the stone pillars in the basement and watched as Willem Keane’s body, now zipped into its plastic shroud, was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled toward the elevator. Ellie had arrived within ten minutes of his call, and she had been pretty helpful, he had to admit, helping to secure the building and getting an initial list of everyone who had been there that afternoon. She’d gotten the security tapes ready for viewing already, and he’d watched her in action with Sweeney, making sure she was okay, getting her a glass of water, asking if she needed a ride home, and waiting with her until Ian Ball came to pick her up.