I stopped at the near edge of the patio. Gideon went to his grill. Adam seemed to be drinking in the tranquility corralled by the unbroken tree line encircling the yard. His demeanor was not what I expected. He seemed completely resigned to his fate, almost lifeless, like a hand-puppet without its puppeteer. But he was talkative, not ill at ease, which I thought would be the case, given the situation he created involving Gideon. Maybe he was medicated. Taking something for depression. Then, I felt an eyebrow lift. Had Janice shared some of her stash?
Laying tongs on the grill’s side tray, Gideon said, “The steaks are looking good, but they’re not ready yet. We might as well start on the wine.”
This broke Adam’s concentration. He turned, and we all gathered around the glass-top table. I mentally applauded Gideon for his hard work. The patio was presentable, the table glass clean, and the bottle of wine and three glasses at the ready.
Gideon worked the cork out of the chilled bottle of red wine and poured.
“I want to thank you two for having me over. You didn’t have to. Lately, I’ve been a real— Well, since there’s a lady present, I won’t say what I’ve been,” Adam recanted, aiming a tired smile my way. Gideon handed me the first glass of wine. “I accept full responsibility for everything. I know I already admitted this to Dillon and the board, but I owe you a personal apology.” He pinned his eyes to Gideon’s. “I can’t fix this. I wish I could. And I wish I could help you get the collection ready for shipment. I could really use something to do.”
“I wish you could too,” Gideon said truthfully, I thought, and passed him a glass.
Adam’s atonement continued. “I’d like to have an opportunity to apologize to the kids, but the ban from campus took care of that. I’m to be escorted to the meeting Monday in the president’s office. Then I look to be exiled forever.”
On that note, Gideon raised his long-stemmed wineglass in a toast. “To better days. May they come soon and be long-lasting.”
We drank to that.
Between Gideon and me, we got the meal ready to be served and never left our guest unattended. We moved in and out of the house, carting and carrying. The sourdough bread was warm, the potato salad cold, the steaks grilled to perfection, the wineglasses refilled, and the evening balmy and quiet. We let Adam lead the conversation. It centered around the theft. It would have been ludicrous to speak of anything else. I sensed Gideon’s eagerness to get on to other business. Our guest’s neatly worded confession did not embrace certain deceptions he put into play on the evening before the theft: specifically, why he changed the venue for the final security meeting with Eastwood’s police chief Vince Dwight, and what happened during the forty-five minutes he’d gone missing after the meeting and before his return to the lab. Gideon held back, and so did I. As proper etiquette demands, full-fledged interrogations shall not begin until after dessert.
Gideon thought of dessert, too. French vanilla ice cream with a mint-chocolate topping. Simple. Tasty. This man is a godsend. While I scooped and drizzled and put the coffeemaker to work at the kitchen counter, snippets of conversation drifted through the mud-porch screens. Gideon turned the discussion to the names he provided Sergeant Sherrie Lippincott yesterday under the heading of private collectors.
With dishes of ice cream on a tray, I pushed through the screen door.
“I’m like you. I don’t know the name, Anson Harris, but the other two, I definitely recognize. Where’s Harris from?” Adam asked.
“Coffee’s coming,” I said to the men, setting a dish in front of Adam, then Gideon.
“Boston,” Gideon replied. “My friend at George Washington had no qualms about adding him to the list. We’ll see what Sherrie gets for me.”
“Cedric Benston is a New York native, as I recall.”
“Born and bred. And keeps his illegal antiquities in the family mansion with a heavily guarded front gate.”
“I’ve heard that. He’s got plenty of money to pull something like this off, and God help anyone who gets in his way.”
“You don’t make him sound like a very nice man,” I spoke up, having reseated myself.
“He’s treacherous,” Adam supplied quickly. “Inherited it from his old man. If he’s behind this theft, the cartonnage mask would probably make an even dozen for him. All ill-gotten gains.”
I thought Adam seemed as knowledgeable as Gideon. “How do you know all this?”
“Too much time spent at excavation sites. I wintered in Cairo back in my graduate days. He and Ulrich Closson were mentioned often.”
“I met Closson once. Gosh, it would’ve been…” Gideon paused, tapping the spoon to his mouth, “fifteen, sixteen years ago. He was on-site in Thebes. Now, I guess he directs his operation from his home somewhere around Chicago. It’s a fortress, too. The Egyptian gold in that place would put Fort Knox to shame.”
“Hey, the stolen mask was Theban, wasn’t it?” I recalled, jabbing my spoon at Gideon.
Nodding, he said, “Closson has a soft spot for Theban artifacts.”
“And Benston for funeral masks,” Adam added.
“Makes it difficult to choose, doesn’t it?” I remembered the young king’s face who stared back from the glossy pamphlet page and wondered which collector stared at it now.
Soon, the scraping of spoons across the china dwindled, and Gideon rose to clear. Screen-door handle in his grasp, he fixed a look on Adam. In the unmistakable tone of a superior to a subordinate, he said, “I’ll bring out the coffee. I hope you can stay a while. We need to talk.”
Adam’s eyes remained glued to the door long after Gideon went inside.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I cried and sprung out of the chair, much to the surprise of the man seated next to me.
I heard the rustling of underbrush on the other side of our personal pathway into the woods. Agilely, I dodged the grill and intercepted a reeking Tarbutton a few steps off the patio. His black curls were laced with filth. I didn’t want to touch him, but didn’t see any other way. The smoky scent of grilled meat was too strong of a draw for the dog. I couldn’t control him without grabbing his collar.
Behind me, Adam’s chair scraped against the tiles, and he came to the gyrating animal. “Who’s this?”
“Tarbutton.” I pushed the dog’s backend down to keep from being slashed by his tail. “He belongs to my neighbor up at the big house.”
“What a brute,” was Adam’s apt description.
“I’m going to walk him out to the lane and send him home.”
Home was a word Tarbutton understood. Home set him in motion again.
I used his momentum to direct him to the gravel drive, wooing him through the process with positive reinforcement in doggie language. I walked side-saddle. One hand gripped the dog’s collar. One guided his rump. I didn’t want him brushing against my dress.
Adam followed us. We passed the kitchen window and heard the telephone ring.
Once I cleared Adam’s car, I shoved the dog off, like a hand-launched missile, fired across the lane. Watching him go, I babbled on about the amazing eighty-year old matriarch of the Hancock family. “How she keeps that dog clean, I’ll never understand. A bath for Tarbutton is an everyday event.”
I turned, dusting my hands, and found Adam chewing his lip.
“Do you know what Gideon’s got on his mind?”
Clearly his boss’s parting comment inferred the dreaded pop quiz. Unprepared, he would pry the topic out of me. We stood next to his sedan. It seemed as though the nervousness I expected upon his arrival belatedly climbed out of the back seat.
Not seeing the harm in tutoring him, I said, “He wants to know why it took you forty-five minutes to get back to the lab from Vince’s office Wednesday night after the security meeting. And he wants to know why you said Vince changed the location of the meeting from the lab to his office. That wasn’t true, Adam.”
His thin face stretched with each accusation. “I’m such a fool.”
“Why,
Adam?” I breathed. The question I asked myself for so long was finally in front of the man who could answer it. I didn’t know he would tell a lovesick puppy story, the second one I heard today.
He lumbered through the grass toward the caretaker’s quarters and lowered himself very slowly onto the bench where, years ago, Gideon left the lily-white feathers and the rolled parchment. This was the place of beginning for our love story. From it, I heard the closing chapter of a story that had never quite been love for Adam Porter. The realization of this seemed to crash down around him as he spoke.
“She was so pretty. She made me think I could do anything. Be anything. I wanted the chairmanship of the history department at Eastwood. She said Gideon should be ousted. She said I was the better man, that he shouldn’t have gotten the promotion when Old Man Berryhill retired. She made me believe that.” Sourly, he spoke of events from three years ago that seemed to linger with a bad taste. “She got behind me with this collection. She said it was a way to make Dillon see how valuable I was. She gave me suggestions. No other woman was ever interested in my work before. Hell, they were barely interested in me. When I was with her, I was strong, smart, funny. I was going somewhere. I knew it.” Then his eyes filled. “She made me think I could do anything. Now... Now...” His thoughts died there.
Throughout, his emotions fluctuated with mine. I listened without interruption. Regarded him with pity. Awed by his animosity. Now that he was finished, I posed three questions.
His answers were brief.
Dumbfounded, I staggered toward the bench, wanting to sit and put my head between my knees. I lost that chance when Gideon called out from the back, wondering where we were.
We rounded the corner to the patio. Gideon immediately tuned in to Adam’s fragile disposition and what must have been my ill-concealed shock.
Tally of Suspects
Adam, Gideon, and I reseated ourselves at the patio table.
For Gideon’s benefit, I paraphrased Adam’s trio of answers. The she in his story equated to our missing redhead, Gina Frawley. He met her at Eastwood. She worked in the mailroom. I read the look on Gideon’s face and blurted, “You knew!”
“I knew she worked in Eastwood’s mailroom. Vince filled me in this afternoon. Sherrie brought it to him for verification Friday. She hasn’t shown up for work since the theft. When you got home late, there wasn’t an opportunity to tell you. Her name meant nothing to me when Sherrie mentioned it because Janice always picked up my mail, but Adam went over after his own.” His face panned toward the associate professor. “I didn’t know Adam and she were seeing each other.”
I, too, watched Adam as he fit these newly learned pieces together.
“Vince? The cops? Why are they asking about Gina?” he demanded.
Gideon rode roughshod over him. “Where is she, Adam?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. A cell number then?”
“I don’t have one. I saw her in the mailroom. We made our plans there.”
“An address?”
“I don’t have one,” Adam said, his response prickly.
“You date a girl. You don’t call her. You don’t pick her up.”
“That’s how she wanted it.”
“Bullshit. Were you so enamored with a grown woman that you let her treat you like a school boy? What was she hiding from?”
“She wasn’t hiding. She was hiding me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She lived with some other girls. She told me they would have teased her, said her nose was in the air if they found out she was dating a professor.”
“Associate professor.” Gideon halted Adam’s explanation to goad him. Adam’s face hardened. “What else?”
After a few seconds of stubborn resistance, Adam said, “She said she liked the secrecy. It was a turn-on.”
Gideon coughed up a ridiculing laugh. Simultaneously, panic filled Adam’s face. “Tell me about Gina. Why are the police asking about her? I don’t understand.”
Gideon sat smugly silent.
“Damn it. I’ve answered your questions, Gideon. Now answer mine.”
“You’ve said nothing about your disappearing and reappearing keys.”
Adam and I exchanged glances. This subject matter was not covered in my version of the quiz.
“Is that supposed to be some kind of riddle?”
“You’re no tower of intellect, Adam, but you know what I mean. Janice and I talked after Vince left. The cops asked him about Eastwood keys in this Gina-woman’s possession. Vince told them there shouldn’t have been any. The mailroom’s never locked. But then Janice and I started thinking about your keys, which conveniently keep going missing. Your keys to the building, the lab, the storeroom. Your keys that could’ve placed the thief face to face with the safe.”
“No. It couldn’t have happened that way.” Horrified, he turned ashen, seeing his criminal complicity going from bad to worse.
“You didn’t go home with them Tuesday night. Janice said she had to let you in Wednesday morning. You told her you’d left your keys on your desk. Did you find them there?”
He shook his head.
“I didn’t think so because Wednesday night, after all the artifacts were packed in the safe, I had to lock up. Your excuse was the same. The cops seem to think someone duplicated keys for Gina. The timing fits the days you couldn’t put your hands on your keys. Were they Eastwood keys? Were they yours?” Gideon was as persistent as a housefly at a window screen.
I knew the “someone” was Wilkey Summer, and the timing was right. I also knew Gina Frawley could not be the thief. I bit my lip, opting to let the man who lay his glasses on the tabletop respond.
“Let me think.” Adam rubbed his temples, attempting to stir up memories. “I saw her on Tuesday. We had lunch. Then again Wednesday night after the security meeting with Vince.”
Gideon and I shared a look. The missing forty-five minutes.
“When I got home, I found the keys in the car.” Adam’s face lit. “Hey, Gina had been in the car. She must’ve returned them when we met. I had them Thursday morning when Janice and I discovered the theft and Mackey unconscious.”
This last part jived with the recollection Janice told Gideon and me when we walked her to her car. Perhaps it was time to speak.
“I know the man the police are getting this information from. I talked with him today. He told me Gina gave him keys to copy. She must’ve taken them from you at lunch Tuesday because he made the copies later that day, then returned your keys to her with the duplicates that same night. I think you’re right, Adam. She must’ve slipped yours back to you in the car.”
Gideon picked up the conversation seamlessly. “Then she waltzed right in and cracked the safe. Janice said she’s worked at Eastwood for months now. You must’ve fed her details about the exhibit all along. There was no press on the delivery date. That was prohibited until security was set up. But someone knew the moment it arrived. And that someone was Gina.” Gideon pointed an accusing finger at Adam. “You told her security precautions would be lacking that first night, that wiring the display cases into the alarm system wouldn’t begin until the next day. Hell, you probably told her which pieces were the most valuable. Vince believes she had a partner. Was that partner you?”
Adam erupted instantly with denials to Gideon’s allegations. Gideon was wrong about some of it.
Raising my voice, I broke into their quarrel. “Gina has an alibi for the time of the theft.”
The silence that followed was complete. Even the birds ceased their chatter.
“The man I spoke of earlier was the man she lived with. I’m so sorry, Adam. His name is Wilkey Summer.”
This revelation hit hard. It sucked the air from his lungs and left his mouth hanging open for a long moment before he produced words. “That’s not true. It can’t be.”
“There’s no way Wilkey’s lying.” The living arrangements made it patently
obvious why no contact information was ever provided to Adam.
“No, he has to be.”
“Adam, he’s not.”
His face crumpled.
“He said she was home by ten, probably after she met you.” I watched his eyes. They provided tacit confirmation of the time element. With that, I sent the next detail to Gideon. “She stayed home all night.”
“And you believe this guy?” Gideon asked, doubt smeared across his words.
“He has no reason to lie at this point. He’s in a lot of trouble because of her. Gina couldn’t have worked alone, but Adam wasn’t her accomplice. Why would the two of them go through the motions of making keys for a building he already had keys for? No, the actual theft can’t be pinned on either Gina or Adam.”
Gideon listened to my logic, eyes lowered. He adjusted the turned-under cuffs on his white shirt with exacting precision.
Shaking my head, I went on. “This issue with the keys only gets us so far. Gina didn’t use the duplicated keys, but she put them in the hands of someone who did.”
We sat in a ring of silence. A few seconds ticked by.
“She couldn’t have just left.” With those moaned words, Adam let comprehension enter to the place where, I thought, he wanted a breath of disbelief to linger.
“She didn’t tell Wilkey she planned to take off either. When he got home from work Thursday afternoon, her things were gone. He hasn’t seen her since,” I said.
A shady haze gathered around us. Minutes before, the sun toppled over the trees, but there was plenty of light to see Adam’s face glaze over with pain. Compassion for him rose, but I pushed it back; lest I forget, he partnered in a mutiny against Gideon. He had only himself to thank for his current state of affairs.
Depressed and ill-tempered, we were left with cold coffee still in the pot and no further options to discuss. Everyone we knew had been ruled out, and someone we didn’t had the Egyptian jewelry and funeral mask.
Gideon and I saw a glum Adam Porter off shortly thereafter. Reality hit him hard. He sold his soul for sex and jail time to the calculating Gina Frawley. I’m afraid our hospitality didn’t improve his disposition much, if at all.
Deadly Homecoming at Rosemont Page 22