Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  “Would you care to explain why I am here,” Vasquez demanded of Rigby. “The other officer refused to say anything except that someone had died. What could I know?”

  “Do you know who has died, Mr Vasquez?” Sam asked.

  “No, I just said���” he stopped, then frowned and returned his attention to Rigby. “It is one of my colleagues? Is that why I’m here? What has happened?”

  “Professor Marsden’s body was found in the State Library this morning,” Rigby stated. “He was murdered.”

  “But I know nothing of this.” Vasquez was horrified. “You think I know something? How can I? I barely know Professor Marsden and I have no idea where your Library is.”

  “But you were seen arguing with Professor Marsden yesterday,” Rigby stated. “Do we have our facts wrong?”

  “Yes. No. I mean your facts are incomplete,” Vasquez replied, regaining his composure. “I did see Professor Marsden yesterday. But not in your Library. Between 3 pm and 4.30 we were working out some details at the Exhibition Building. And we were not arguing.”

  “You did not have an argument of any kind with the Professor?” Sam asked.

  “No! Ah, wait. We did have a ‘discussion’, which may have appeared um���heated. Our views on the subject of cultural artefacts and their repatriation could not be more opposite.”

  “Can you explain what you mean by that,” Rigby requested.

  “The Professor was a dinosaur, a dedicated ‘collector’ whose thinking has not changed with the times. He was as much of a relic, in terms of current international museum practices, as the things he collected. He still believed in an institution’s right to hoard the artefacts of other countries, thus denying those countries their own cultural heritage.”

  “And that’s what you were arguing about?” Rigby asked.

  “Discussing, yes. The return of such items to their rightful owners is something I am most passionate about. My part of the world has been plundered by outsiders for centuries.”

  “Where are you from?” Rigby asked.

  Strangely, Vasquez looked like he had to think about that question. “I have come from Colombia,” he replied. “Things are changing though and maybe, one day, we will get everything back - what little there is left of our histories in South America.”

  “This desire of yours to get your stuff back seems pretty strong,” Rigby suggested bluntly.

  Vasquez laughed. “There was nothing personal in our discussion, Detective. Debates like the one we had go on every day in museums the world over. It’s a sign of the times. I did not kill Professor Marsden because we had a difference of opinion. In fact we ended up agreeing, and laughing I might add, about the rather dubious merits of the ‘Life and Death’ exhibition.”

  “You were laughing about your own exhibition?” Sam asked.

  Vasquez shrugged. “What can I say? It is Dr Bridger’s exhibition. I am simply the working curator, which means I do all the work. For me it is just a job, but career-wise it is a little embarrassing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good show but ‘show’ is the best word for it. Our artefacts may draw in a public curious to see a collection of exotic phallic symbols and mummified cats, but it is a questionable concept for a serious exhibition. Professor Marsden and I agreed it was simply an excuse for Marcus to travel the world - and make money.”

  “Andrew Barstoc and Adrienne Douglas,” Rigby read the names from his list. “We understand they went sightseeing together today. Do you have any idea where?”

  “Sightseeing?” Vasquez snorted. “I find that���unlikely. And wherever they are, I doubt they’re together. Knowing Adrienne she’s probably ‘visiting’ your casino.”

  “What is her job with the exhibition?” Sam asked.

  “She’s our public relations expert, and Andrew is our expert in logistics. It’s his job to make sure everything runs smoothly, that in each new city - and we’ve been in eight in the last year and a half - we have everything we need to set up the show. But while we’ve been waiting for the second shipment Andrew has been off making business wherever he can.”

  “What sort of business?” Rigby asked.

  “I have no idea. That is what he does. He’s a business man. He’ll be on site when the rest of the exhibits get delivered tomorrow and is always on call, but he will spend the rest of his time, as usual, taking care of his own personal���” Vasquez shrugged, “���‘business’.”

  Sam rubbed the back of her neck to stem the annoying prickling sensation she always got when a seemingly unrelated fact surfaced from somewhere in her memory, prompting her mind to leap to a most unlikely conclusion. Failing to convince herself that her suspicions were based purely on coincidence she was half way out the door before she realised.

  “Are you all right Sam?” Rigby was asking. “You look like you’ve just remembered you left the iron on at home.”

  “Sorry. Something did just occur to me. I have to check it out straight away.” She turned to Vasquez and asked, “When did you arrive in Melbourne with the first lot of exhibits?”

  “Last Wednesday, ” he replied.

  Sam returned to Marsden’s office and, relieved to find it empty, sat down at his desk. She put the gloves back on, took her phone out of her jacket pocket and dialled her office number. While she waited for Ben Muldoon to answer, she removed the blotter from the desk top again and opened the ‘Rites of Life and Death’ catalogue to the contents page.

  “Muldoon here.”

  “Hi Ben, it’s me,” Sam said, cradling the phone awkwardly with her shoulder while she used a pen to scrape some of the ‘icing sugar’ into an evidence bag. “Have you had any leads on the origin of that new stuff that hit the streets last weekend?”

  “Nothing concrete. Just a rumour that it’s a brand new source,” Ben replied.

  “Well, I may have news for you. I’ve got something for the lab to check first.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the Museum’s admin offices.”

  “You found something there?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll explain when I get back. In the meantime get the squad to check out a shipment of exhibits that came in by plane from Paris today. Make a call to stop it leaving the airport if it hasn’t already. It’s for a show called the ‘Rites of Life and Death’, though it might be registered in the name of Dr Marcus Bridger, or for delivery to the Exhibition Building.” Sam disconnected the call.

  “What the hell was that little performance back there about?” Rigby demanded as he strode through the door. Rivers was close behind him trying to get his attention.

  “I think the late Professor may have stumbled onto a smuggling operation,” Sam stated.

  “Smuggling what?”

  She waved the bag. “Cocaine.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “We won’t know for sure till we get this tested. I’ll take it to our lab to compare it with a sample that turned up on Sunday.”

  “There’s something else you should know,” Rivers interjected. “The guys that went to Marsden’s place just rang in. His house has been trashed. They said things like the TV and video were broken, not stolen, and that it looks like someone was seriously looking for something specific.”

  Chapter Three

  Melbourne, Friday September 18, 1998

  “Don’t do this to me,” Sam begged, pounding the steering wheel. A sharp rap on the window nearly frightened the life out of her. The bizarre appearance of her sister completed the job. Jacqui’s hair was littered with sequins, teased outwards in all directions and frozen in space and time by what could only have been the contents of 23 cans of hairspray. She was wearing a gold mini skirt, a leopard skin singlet, fishnet stockings and very high heels.

  Sam struggled out of her seat belt and out of the car. It was eight o’clock in the morning and her sister looked like a tart. Correction. She looked like a drag queen dressed as a tart.

  “I’m afraid I have to
arrest you,” she said. “You cannot go out looking like that.”

  “I’m not going out, I’m coming home.”

  “Oh my god! In that case, I’ll have to shoot you,” Sam stated. “Right after I’ve emptied a clip into this useless bloody car of mine.”

  “I’ll give you a lift to work if you can resist making further comments about my attire,” Jacqui offered, flouncing back to her car which was parked behind Sam’s outside their house.

  Sam locked her clapped-out Mazda, got into Jacqui’s brand new Celica, put her sunglasses on even though it was overcast and tried to pretend she was in a taxi with a total stranger.

  “I had the best time last night,” Jacqui volunteered after several minutes silence.

  “Did you go out with Ben dressed like that?” Sam asked, bracing herself as Jacqui swung out into the traffic on Beaconsfield Parade and headed towards St Kilda.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jacqui declared. “Ben and I have a date on Friday. Last night I went around to Leo’s for pasta and got picked up by an absolutely gorgeous American sailor.”

  “I’m not surprised a sailor picked you up if you trawled Fitzroy Street dressed���”

  “I was wearing jeans and a shirt, Sam,” Jacqui interrupted.

  Sam decided it was too early in the day to be dealing with her sister’s habit of providing only half the information necessary to make a conversation understandable. She stared out the window at the dreary sky which was hanging lower than usual, making everything dull and lifeless. In the distance she could see a red super tanker, ploughing towards the Heads, and one determined shaft of sunlight that provided the only light and colour on the flat, grey-green expanse of Port Phillip Bay.

  “Reuben, his three friends and I had a few drinks at Leo’s���” Jacqui was explaining, while Sam silently questioned the common sense of the four joggers who were pounding along the footpath breathing in toxic peak-hour car fumes. She watched, impressed, as a windsurfer demonstrated perfect control by leaping off his board as he ran it into the sand of St Kilda beach, and astonished as a middle-aged man in an expensive suit lost control of his morning completely by rollerblading face first into a No Standing sign.

  “���and then we went to a gay bar in Commercial Rd.”

  “A gay bar? What on earth for?” Sam asked tuning back in to her sister’s story.

  “Reuben and his mates wanted to check out the local scene,” Jacqui replied, turning left into Fitzroy Street. “That’s what gay guys like to do, Sam. There’s no need to look so amazed.”

  “I’m not amazed Jacqui, I’m confused. You said you were ‘picked up’ by a gorgeous sailor.”

  “Yeah. We went drinking and dancing, then we met these drag queens and went back to someone’s penthouse and put on a fashion parade. Hence the outfit. It was a real hoot.”

  “No wonder you have trouble finding ‘the right man’,” Sam remarked, shaking her head.

  “Well, not that you’d know Ms Workaholic, but the only men out there these days are married, gay or desperate. And the gay guys are, without doubt, the most fun.”

  “I think you’re looking in the wrong places,” Sam remarked.

  “Oh yeah? When was the last time you had a date?”

  “I’m not looking,” Sam stated.

  “There you go then,” Jacqui pronounced.

  “There I go where?”

  “To an old policemen’s home where you can while away your dotage with other socially-retarded cops, reliving old cases and wondering whatever happened to your sex life.”

  “Well, at the rate you’re going, Jacqui my sweet, you’ll end up in charge of the geriatric make-up and karaoke sessions at the old queens disco,” Sam retorted.

  Ten minutes later Sam stood, with a small crowd, in the foyer of the Anato Building on St Kilda Road waiting for the lift. The lower 12 floors of the 14-storey building accommodated a variety of organisations including law and accounting firms, a psychiatrist or three, a couple of dentists and doctors, a firm of private investigators and a publishing house that produced what Sam called ‘woo-woo’ publications - books and magazines about crystals, angels, spirit guides, and out-of-body encounters with aliens from the Pleiades. The top two floors belonged to the high security offices of the Australian Crime Bureau - Melbourne branch.

  Sam squeezed into the lift, waited while buttons were pushed by the other occupants, then pressed 12A. By the time the doors opened on the 13th floor the lift was empty except for Sam and two detectives she recognised but didn’t know. While they waited for the officer on the other side of the bullet proof security door to okay each of them as they swiped their ID cards, Sam wondered whether her companions were also ‘socially retarded’ or had wives and children to go home to each night.

  One of the pitfalls of being on the force was that the most suitable partner for a cop was another cop - someone who understood the hours and the unique stress of the job. But the odds were against finding the right someone in such a limited pool. That’s why so many cops retreated to the pub after work, to de-brief with mates who shared the same daily crap, so they didn’t have to take it home to a civilian husband or wife who could not possibly empathise.

  Sam’s own experience of the cop/civilian tango had been three times unsuccessful. One guy found he couldn’t date a cop; one had offered to support her so she didn’t have to be a cop; and the last had given the ultimatum - him or the job. The job was far more interesting. She then tried dating a fellow officer but that ended in disaster when his concern for her safety, because she was a ‘woman’, jeopardised an assignment.

  So Sam decided there was nothing wrong with being single. It made her career choices easier and her social life freer. She was still open to taking a chance should a potential someone enter her world, but she wasn’t desperately seeking anyone. Besides, judging by the trouble her sister and half her friends, also in their thirties, were having finding a compatible partner it obviously wasn’t her job that was the problem. It was her generation; it was the gains of feminism versus the stagnation of masculinism; it was life at the arse-end of the millennium; it was the hole in the ozone layer; it was���

  “Morning Sam. You’re in deep shit.”

  Ben Muldoon - case in point, Sam thought. Thirty-six years old, good prospects, not bad looking (in a scrawny sort of way), never married and prepared to date Jacqui - a lunatic masquerading as a sister - just for something to do.

  “Morning Ben. You’re looking pretty good yourself,” Sam smiled, depositing her gun and holster in her desk drawer.

  “I mean it, Sam. You know that cocaine you sent for testing?” Ben pushed his chair back and crossed his arms. “It was icing sugar.”

  “Damn,” Sam said flatly.

  “That’s not all. That shipment you sent us to examine? Carved penises,” he said, as if it was business as usual. “Some were attached to little goblin-type figures, but most of them stood alone. Made all us blokes feel pretty inadequate. Oh, there were also some sticks and stones, ceremonial items I believe, a bunch of huge photographic displays and the ashes of some dead geezer from Persia, but mostly there were penises. The sniffer dogs had a good time with the mummified cat though.”

  Sam took a deep breath, ran her hands through her hair and sat down heavily in her chair. “The Boss is ropable,” Ben added, unnecessarily. “And the guy, that Dr Whatsit in charge of the exhibition, he’s as mad as hell; although he took it out on his own staff instead of us, which made a nice change.”

  “Muldoon! Is that ex-partner of yours here yet?” Dan Bailey, the ACB’s Chief Inspector, otherwise and universally known as ‘the Boss’ and who, until probably this very minute, was Sam’s mentor in the Bureau, stuck his head over the partition. “You two. My office. Now.”

  Bailey closed his office door calmly, waved them to the spare chairs, sat down at his desk and smiled benignly at Sam.

  “Special Detective Diamond, would you care to explain, precisely, why you se
nt Muldoon and the squad on a wild willy chase to the airport yesterday, and why you wasted valuable lab time on a substance commonly, and legally, used in the making of fairy cakes.”

  “I’m sorry Boss but, at the time, the facts I had pointed to the possibility that the exhibition was being used as a cover for drug smuggling. Professor Marsden’s murder itself appeared to indicate that he had stumbled on something.”

  “Which ‘facts’ were these?”

  “I suppose, in retrospect, it was a hunch based on a set of coincidences,” Sam admitted.

  “It’s not often that Sam is wrong Boss,” Ben volunteered.

  “Granted. But all her other ‘miraculous’ flashes of intuition put together do not make up for this bloody disaster.”

  “Despite the outcome Boss, I’m convinced that the Professor’s murder has something to do with the exhibition or those involved in it. And just because Ben found nothing yesterday, doesn’t mean there wasn’t something in the first shipment.”

  “That’s possible,” Bailey conceded. “And I can see the headline: ‘Drug lord arrested; famous archaeologist charged with operating icing sugar ring.”

  “Okay, so I jumped to conclusions on the drug thing. I’m sorry, it was a bit far fetched.” Sam felt suitably chastened but not convinced her theory was wrong as the prickling sensation in the back of her neck had not dissipated.

  “Actually, it’s not all that far fetched,” Ben stated. “After I had rejected the notion that Sam sent us to check out those ‘things’ in order to get revenge for the girlie calendar in the lunch room, I figured there must be something to her request, so I did some checking - internationally.”