The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  She rubbed her eyes and then used the tips of her fingers to knead the spots on her forehead where her headache had settled. She was tired.

  She had been at her research for a couple of weeks, relieved only by her daily exercise break and the five or six hours she spent rehashing the evidence in a feverish half-consciousness that had to serve her as sleep. Elle was tired of staying in the hotel room working, and she wasn’t sure that she was getting anywhere.

  Elle couldn’t just give up and pretend to believe that the man who had killed Sharon would get caught automatically. Maybe he would, but if the cops got him and convicted him five years from now, they’d think they had won. So far the police had made none of the connections, even the obvious ones. There had been no announcement that the deaths of the three rich people were connected with the deaths of Sharon and Peter, even though the methods were identical and the shootings took place a week apart. No spokesman had even announced that a comparison of the bullets had been conducted. Where was the cop who said, “You know, this scene looks a lot like the one in Beverly Hills”?

  If there was a cop like that, he hadn’t made any noise about it. Elle would have to keep working with the information she had stolen and the illegal recordings she was making in the Nemesis office, and hope she caught somebody before anyone caught her.

  Another four days and nights passed while she worked. She was watching the recordings of the previous twenty-four hours on the fifth morning, when she noticed a change that had taken place during the night shift. Hernandez the dispatcher had been on a diet for two weeks now, and she was in the dispatch room looking in the mirror at her uniform trying to detect a change. The pants and the belt still bound a barrel-shaped torso, which had only a slight variation near the top where her breasts must be. The waist of her marine-pressed uniform shirt was no narrower than the shoulders and might even be a bit wider than her hips, in spite of the fact that Elle had been watching her ingest nothing but black coffee during that time.

  Just as Hernandez stepped out of the dispatch room and stopped in the kitchen for more coffee, there was the sound of engines outside. A few seconds later the double doors on the airport side of the building swung open hard enough to hit the wall. Behind them were the boss, Ed; and then the two men who had been in the burglars’ van the night the burglars had been murdered. A few moments later came the blond woman, Shar, and the two men who usually rode with her, Flanders and Escobedo.

  They were all in a jovial mood, laughing and talking over one another so Elle couldn’t distinguish individual sentences well. She heard Ed tell someone, “Nice assist.”

  “He was the last one, wasn’t he?” That seemed to come from McNulty, the one who had interrupted Elle’s visit to the Mannons.

  “Right.” This was from a male voice, but Elle couldn’t tell which.

  “Then that’s that.”

  The boss stopped and blocked the others. He looked back at McNulty. “That is never that. As long as there’s money on the table, somebody will be trying to get at it. Nothing’s changed.” He went into his office and closed his door behind him.

  The others stood for a few seconds and then they began to make their way to the bathrooms. Shar had her own because she was the only woman besides Hernandez, but the men all went in rapid succession into the other one.

  Elle didn’t think they all had to pee at once, like passengers getting off an airplane. They were all using their first chance to wash their hands. They had done something. They were washing off the gunshot residue or the blood spatter or some other evidence. She was sure of it.

  She waited as they all emerged and turned their attention to the next thing. Some of them looked at the duty whiteboard to see if the assignments beside their names had changed, or maybe just to refresh their memories of what had been up there at the start of the shift. Three of them went into the break room to pour themselves Styrofoam cups of coffee and fit lids on them.

  Shar ducked into Hernandez’s dispatch room. She stayed only fifteen or twenty seconds and then came back out. Elle had noticed before that the only two women made a point of talking alone once in a while. She didn’t think their bond was close, but they couldn’t ignore each other.

  Within a few more minutes both teams were on their way back out. Elle transferred the footage to a new file and went back to studying the paperwork she had photographed during her burglaries.

  It was not until days later that she thought about the quiet celebration at the Nemesis office again. It began during her break to let the maid clean her hotel room. She did a more strenuous version of her daily workout that morning—more time in the gym on the weights, the bars, and the machines; a longer run; and then more lengths in the pool. When she had finished and dressed again she went to the hotel restaurant and read the Los Angeles Times while she ate lunch.

  She noticed the article right away. It wasn’t at the top or in the long column on the left. It was in an inferior position, a square in the lower right corner, but that was still on the front page. “Curator’s Death Ruled a Suicide.”

  She turned to the body of the article, several pages inside. As she found it she was wondering why she had known instantly that the news meant something. It seemed to be an item that was so close to what she had been thinking about that it must be connected. The article had a byline: Christopher Mainz, the L.A. Times art critic.

  Jeffrey Arundel Semple, world-renowned scholar and popular pillar of the Los Angeles art scene, has died after seventeen years as a senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His influence on the growth and development of the institution, its collections, and the city’s position in the world of art and connoisseurship would be difficult to overstate.

  Mr. Semple received his bachelor of arts degree and his PhD at Harvard University and then spent several years serving internships and holding junior positions at a succession of European museums, including the Prado and the Louvre, before coming to Los Angeles at the invitation of museum director Aldous Pernell.

  Police spokesperson Lieutenant Jennifer Bolt said his death took place between Saturday afternoon, when he spoke before a group of more than two hundred museum members at a reception, and Sunday evening, when he failed to attend a dinner with friends, who found him deceased. The coroner’s office has ruled the manner of death to be suicide. A memorial will be announced by family and friends at a later date.

  Elle had begun to work the information into the facts that she already had. She had never heard of this man, but she had assumed there was such a man, or, more likely, a dozen or more men, as always. Each institution of civilization was always attributed to the bold vision of one person, but the long-term process of making these organizations real came from years and years of work by people who knew how to build and operate them. A museum couldn’t exist without experts any more than a power plant could.

  She instinctively felt sorry for this man, but she had a suspicion about him too. The revelations of her past few weeks began presenting themselves in her memory in different combinations, and her mind was trying to see how they could all fit together with his death.

  Elle signed for her lunch and made her way upstairs to her room. It had been cleaned meticulously as usual, the tip she’d left was gone, and her personal belongings were undisturbed. She opened her laptop computer. She didn’t know everything yet, but she was fairly sure that some people at Nemesis would have read the article and reacted to the announcement of Semple’s suicide. They would probably be thinking of it as a victory. On Saturday night, they had come back elated, having done something that made them all think it was prudent to wash their hands. And now she thought she understood one of the jokes she’d heard. “Nice assist” had seemed to be a sports reference then, but it sounded different now that what happened to Semple was being considered a suicide.

  24

  Elle decided to make it a habit to check on the name of the dead curator, Jeffrey Semple, once a day to see if there was any new in
formation on his case. There were a few things that she knew would be done during the next few weeks. One was that the authorities would be trying to make sure the coroner was right about the manner of death.

  Semple had apparently been a respected man who was well liked by plenty of important—meaning rich and generous—Los Angeles art lovers. The marriage of art and money provided an outlet for various kinds of snobbery. One was the belief that the superbly educated and well bred stopped killing themselves in Roman times. The authorities would have to be ready to persuade Semple’s defenders that he hadn’t been murdered. Elle didn’t know much about the man yet, but she did know quite a bit about certain other people, so for the moment she too had trouble accepting the suicide theory.

  Once the suicide theory was established—correctly or not—there would be multiple investigations of what had prompted him to kill himself. She was betting that there was a suicide note. If you wanted to fake someone’s suicide you would almost certainly supply one. That way, any law enforcement professional who wasn’t already calling it a murder could accept the suicide, sign off, and go to lunch an hour early.

  For now Elle spent her time going through the connections among the victims. She used Valerie Teason’s minutes from the LACMA meetings to establish the dates and times when the two women and Semple were all together. In the instances when it was clear that Mr. Semple was at a meeting for a particular professional purpose, she noted the topic on which he spoke.

  Next she consulted both women’s files for the guest lists of receptions, exhibition openings, fund-raisers, parties, and other events to see which ones had included Semple and the women. There were quite a few topics on which Semple was an expert. The museum’s website listed twenty-two “Curatorial Areas,” ranging alphabetically from “African Art” to “South and Southeast Asian Art.” Semple was curator of “American Art.” That appeared to have also made him a stakeholder in “Contemporary Art,” “Modern Art,” “Decorative Arts and Design,” “Prints and Drawings,” and “Photography” and knowledgeable on the whole topic of museum management, collections, and exhibitions.

  Elle had an urge to see what he had looked like, so she searched the internet for photographs and found a few. He was tall and thin and wore glasses with frames that were transparent and flesh colored, like those many men wore in the era of World War II. The newspaper said he was fifty-one when he died. Elle studied his appearance for clues. She knew that if he had not found himself in Los Angeles he would have worn tweed jackets. As it was, in most pictures he wore a crisp white shirt with a tie. He had a long, narrow nose and a noble brow—handsome for a man his age. That meant she couldn’t rule him out as a romantic partner of one or both of the women just yet. He was professorial, but the kind of professor who had once been a famous cricket player or mountain climber but never mentioned it. In the photographs he was often shown in a group of other people, nearly always smiling broadly enough to reveal a row of even upper teeth.

  She ran out of information about him in two days, but she did manage to find another stretch of recording from her spy cameras at the Nemesis office that she thought was worth keeping.

  Shar the blonde, who seemed to be the kind of woman who couldn’t help flirting with the boss, came in at the beginning of the evening shift carrying a copy of the Los Angeles Times folded under her arm. She walked into Ed’s office, held it up, and then released two fingers to let the paper unfold to show the announcement of Semple’s death.

  “Saw it two hours ago,” Ed said.

  “Anything you’d like conveyed to the troops?”

  “Tell them to get to work.”

  Elle made sure the short conversation got into the Semple file and Shar’s file. She knew it didn’t prove anything by itself, but she steadfastly refused to make any decisions about the information she had been finding and storing. Drawing conclusions was a part of the process that was somewhere in the future. Right now she was focused on finding and storing everything.

  She was pretty sure she was, at some point, going to have to tell this story to somebody, but she couldn’t do it until she knew what the story was. This new killing, she was sure, was part of the story.

  25

  The website of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art featured a new notice. It said that special requests to view or borrow works from the permanent collection would be held temporarily because the collection was undergoing an inventory.

  Of course, Elle thought. She had read a few times over the years of curators and other museum officials getting caught after quietly stealing art or artifacts from public collections. She was sure she had never heard of it happening at a major museum. Usually it happened at a small college or privately endowed collection whose directors didn’t know the value of something a donor had left them in his will—a series of paintings or rare books or a decorated triptych from a medieval church. The official would get caught trying to sell it, but sometimes the crime would be hushed up because the institution didn’t want other potential donors to become spooked.

  The LACMA permanent collection was not some small-time operation. LACMA was the largest collection west of Chicago. The site said the permanent collection was about a hundred thousand items.

  The museun couldn’t be completing an inventory just because a curator with an unblemished reputation had killed himself. It was a massive job that would require the attention of the surviving twenty-one curators and an army of trained personnel. Could the police have found some work from the collection in his house? No. That would have been the lead item in the news reports about his death.

  Elle had always known that nobody but an idiot ever tried to steal art from museums. When a theft occurred it was always an inside job. And if a curator took something, it would have to be a special situation where he believed he was taking advantage of some weakness in the system, some temporary opportunity. He would have to be able to conceal the theft. Maybe he would remove the item from the museum’s records or provide a written explanation of where the item went. “What happened to Don Augustino Reviews His Troops on Parade?” “This notation says it’s in Vienna for the exhibition of sixteenth-century martial paintings. The show opens this fall, and then the exhibition will tour for five years.”

  But that kind of story didn’t fit any of the facts that Elle had uncovered. Valerie Teason and Anne Mannon were on the board, but that didn’t make them insiders. A curator like Jeffrey Semple wouldn’t have needed, or even benefited from, their help in a theft. And if he and they had stolen something, it wouldn’t have gotten anybody killed; they’d just be arrested.

  In spite of the fact that Elle liked art museums, she was no art expert. What she was an expert at was stealing. Nobody with a functioning brain stole art. It made even less sense for an insider to consider stealing anything. He would know that great paintings were too famous to sell. A man like Semple knew that the sudden shift of a van Gogh or a Jackson Pollock to a new owner would be known around the world in an hour. By the second hour the talk would be about why the former owner would have considered accepting any offer for it. And soon there would be a hold on the curator’s passport and people pounding on his door.

  And then Elle knew. The knowledge was simply a rearrangement of the information she had been collecting for weeks into a different configuration. It was like a slight turn of a puzzle piece that made every piece fit. First she didn’t know, and then she knew.

  She wasn’t in command of every detail yet, but she knew that a great many details were in her possession. She would just have to look at each one and see what it told her now that it was part of a picture. What mattered was that already she knew the main fact. The main fact was that there was no money in stealing paintings from a major museum’s collection. The money was in buying paintings that were underappreciated, and therefore undervalued, and making them better appreciated.

  She worked her way to a formulation that made sense. Jeffrey Semple had not been taking things out of the coll
ection and selling them. If he had been doing something, it was helping Valerie Teason and Anne Mannon to add paintings to the museum’s collection.

  Elle’s professional sense of how dirty money was made allowed her to grasp the potential instantly, and her weeks of research had told her just where to look for specifics. Two years ago Valerie Teason and Anne Mannon had bought twenty-five paintings from Nick Kavanagh, or, more accurately, through Nick Kavanagh. The paintings had cost between $3,000 and $10,000 each. If Valerie and Anne managed to get one painting each by Sarah Prestmantle, Aaron Wilbertson, and Albert Stolkos included in the permanent collection of LACMA, what would they be worth? Quite a bit more than they had been.

  What if the respected curator Jeffrey Semple then began the process of giving the paintings a bit of publicity? He might plan an exhibition and give them a walk-on role. He might, for instance, have a large-scale show drawn from the museum’s American collection and presented in a historical context. He could start with paintings from the colonial and revolutionary period, with Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart. Then he could move to the turn of the nineteenth century and the regional schools, including the Hudson River School with Thomas Cole, Moran, and Wilberton, who would be an ideal figure to lead into the westward movement from George Catlin to Frederic Remington. Semple could put in the European-trained and sophisticated John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, taking the story to the turn of the twentieth century. He could segue into the next generation of sophisticates with the art deco movement, including the naturalized American Sarah Prestmantle, and then the jazz age, the Depression, and the public art sponsored by the WPA program. There could be a grim pause for World War II, and then the postwar modernists, including de Kooning and Pollock and Stolkos, and on to the likes of Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko and to the most recent works by living artists.