by Larry Darter
Going around back, I resumed knocking at the back door using my other hand for a change. The more I knocked with no response from inside, the more irritated and determined I became. After a while I shouted Chloe’s name between fits of knocking. A woman in the neighboring house behind me opened her front door and peered out. But, I wouldn’t be deterred. I kept knocking and shouting Chloe’s name.
A tingle went up my spine, accompanied by a growing sense of uneasiness. My mind lurched from one far-fetched scenario to another. Was Chloe injured inside, perhaps dying and unable to answer the door? Could someone be holding her inside against her will? I contemplated ringing the police for a welfare check. A moment before I reached for my mobile, the back door opened a crack revealing the face of a man of about fifty with close-cropped gray hair and the stubbly growth of at least a three-day beard.
“What do you want?” the man said.
“I’m here to see Chloe,” I said. “Brandi Camargo, her employer sent me to check on her. Ms. Camargo is worried about her since Chloe left work ill on Friday and failed to report for work this afternoon.”
“There is no Chloe here,” the man said. “Go away.”
“Are you Chloe’s father?” I said.
“I’m not answering any questions. Leave my property.”
“I can’t do that until I speak to Chloe,” I said.
It seemed time to get creative.
“Last week someone took a valuable ancient artifact from Ms. Camargo’s shop. There has since been a murder. I know Chloe has information about the theft and murder. Further, because of what she knows, Chloe’s life may also be at risk. I won’t leave before making sure Chloe is okay.”
“If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the cops,” the man said.
Something about his manner and the lack of conviction in his voice told me calling the police was likely the last thing the man might do.
“No worries,” I said. “If you don’t allow me to see your daughter, I’ll call the Honolulu police myself and I’ll wait right here until they arrive.”
I’d played all my cards, including some embellished ones. Now it was all up to the man behind the door.
“I didn’t catch your name,” the man said uncertainly.
“I didn’t toss it,” I said. “But, I’m T. J. O’Sullivan, a detective working for Brandi Camargo.”
“Police?”
“No, I’m a private investigator.”
“Do you have identification?”
“Yes, actually,” I said.
I reached inside my bra and produced a thin leather card holder I used to carry my identification and debit card. Plucking my state private investigator’s identification card out, I held it up.
After studying the card for several moments, the man said, “My mother used to do that.”
Not understanding, I said, “What?”
“She carried stuff around in her bra like you.”
I grinned. “Oh, right. I don’t care for handbags and carrying a wallet in my hip pocket seems a bit too manly.”
The man gave me a wee smile back.
“Makes sense,” he said. Then the smile went away.
“Listen, Chloe has done nothing wrong.”
“No one says she has,” I said. “That’s not why I’ve come. I believe Chloe knows details that have placed her in danger. I’m only here to see that she is all right.”
The man’s expression told me he was struggling to decide something.
“Do you know Austin Bryce or William Chambers?” the man said after a few moments.
“I’m not well acquainted with either of them,” I said. “But, I know they do business with Brandi Camargo.”
The man nodded and thought some more. “Okay, I guess you better come inside,” he said. “We’re in some trouble. Maybe you can help us. I know no one else who can.”
He opened the door and stood back to let me enter. He had a baseball bat in his left hand, held down by his side but in a non-threatening manner. He turned and went toward an open interior door. I closed the back door and followed. We passed through the doorway into a lounge. A young woman in her twenties stood against a wall. She had long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and had on a green top and jean shorts. She held a massive kitchen knife in her right hand.
“Chloe?” I said.
The woman looked at the man beside me and said, “Who is she?”
“Brandi sent me to check on you,” I said.
After glancing at me, she looked back at the man. He nodded and said, “She is a private detective working for your boss. Maybe she can help us.”
I glanced down at the knife and then again made eye contact with the woman.
“You won’t need that, I’m a friend.”
The woman nodded. She laid the knife on a table beside a lamp.
“Okay, I’m Chloe Lawrence,” she said. Nodding toward the man she said, “This is my dad, Ken Lawrence.”
“I’m T. J. O’Sullivan,” I said. “Happy to meet you both.”
“Come in and sit down,” Chloe said. “We will tell you what we know.”
It turned out to be a phenomenal story. Chloe dropped the first bombshell when she said, “I took Tiger Ying.”
Twelve
I hadn’t seen that one coming. Given the circumstances, I had thought Chloe Lawrence knew something about the theft of Tiger Ying. But her frank admission she had taken it was massively unexpected.
“Why?” I said.
“Not to sell it,” Chloe said defiantly. “My dad needed it to prove his innocence.”
Ken Lawrence interrupted. “You will understand what Chloe is saying better if you hear the whole story from the beginning.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m keen to hear it.”
“Sixteen years ago, Austin Bryce framed me for an arson he committed in San Francisco,” Ken said. Then he continued telling me the entire story.
Ken had worked as a curatorial and exhibits assistant at a well-known museum in San Francisco which at the time was headed by Austin Bryce. Ken said a large collection of cultural artifacts from the Chinese Western Zhou dynasty had been loaned to the museum for exhibit by a private antiquities collector named William Chambers. On the eve of the scheduled exhibit opening, Ken and Bryce had worked late into the evening to complete the exhibit hall. The artifacts were to be added to the display the following morning.
“Austin Bryce and I didn’t get along,” Ken said. “He reneged on two pay raises he had promised me, claiming my poor job performance hadn’t warranted them which was a lie. He was a hard man to work for, and couldn’t be trusted to keep his word. The night we were finishing the work in the exhibit hall, I was angry because I was made to work late, more hours I wouldn’t get overtime pay for since I was salaried. That was an all too common occurrence with Bryce.”
Ken said that he and Bryce finished the work on the exhibit hall at around eleven that night. Bryce left the hall to go to the room where the artifacts had been stored, telling Ken he wanted to check the measurements of one of the larger pieces. When Bryce returned about ten minutes later, he said he was going home. Bryce told Ken to lock up and go home too, then Bryce left. Ken told me he was tired after the long day. He grabbed his jacket from where he had left it and left the museum after setting the alarm and locking the door. He went out to his car and left the museum about ten minutes after Bryce.
“Early the next morning, I was awakened by the San Francisco cops at my front door,” Ken said. “Two detectives questioned me about an overnight fire at the museum. I didn’t know anything about the fire and told them so. They asked me if they could search the house. I told them to go ahead, I had nothing to hide.”
“But, they found something?” I said.
“Yes, they found two empty cans of charcoal lighter fluid in the backseat of my car,” Ken said. “And, when they searched the house they found a hand full of kitchen matches in the pocket of the jacket I’d worn the day before. That
was impossible to explain since before they showed me the matches, I’d had told them when they questioned me about it I neither smoked nor used tobacco of any kind.”
“Then what happened?”
“The cops arrested me, took me downtown, and booked me for arson,” Ken said. “The detectives told me they knew I’d set the fire at the museum because of the evidence they had found and because I was the last person to leave the museum the night before. They had already talked to Bryce who told them he believed I must have set fire to the museum in retaliation for not getting pay raises I had demanded but didn’t deserve.”
“You believe Austin Bryce set the fire?” I said.
“I know he did,” Ken said. “He must have set the fire during the ten minutes he was gone from the exhibit hall supposedly to measure one of the artifacts. He immediately left after he returned to the hall and told me to go home. Then I left minutes behind him. I suppose the fire hadn’t become large enough for me to notice before I locked up and went home.”
“And, you think he planted the evidence?”
“Yes, it would have been easy enough,” Ken said. “He could have slipped the matches into the pocket of my jacket while it was unattended. I never locked my old car, so again it would have been easy to put the lighter fluid cans inside it when he left that evening.”
“Didn’t the museum have a fire alarm system?” I said.
“Yes, but as I learned at my trial, someone had disabled the fire alarm and sprinkler systems. To the prosecutor, convinced I’d set the fire, that was more evidence of my intent to cause maximum damage.”
“How much damage did the fire do?” I said.
“It burned one entire wing of the museum to the ground before the fire department got it under control. The arson investigators testified the fire had started in the room where the artifacts we were to exhibit were stored. Everything in the storage room was destroyed. The wooden crates and packing material burned up, and the bronze artifacts melted from the intense heat of the fire.”
“A large financial loss then for William Chambers, the owner of the loaned artifacts?” I said.
“It seemed the artifacts had been destroyed,” Ken said. “But, I’m sure Chambers was made whole by the museum’s insurance company.”
I nodded.
“The jury convicted me, and the judge sentenced me to nine years in prison,” Ken said. “A fireman had been badly hurt while fighting the fire, so the judge gave me an additional three years because the fire had caused serious bodily injury.”
“Then what happened?” I said.
“I went to prison to serve my sentence. Chloe was only four at the time. It devastated my wife, Chloe’s mother. She never got over it. Two years before my sentence was up, my wife took sick and died. Chloe was eleven then. She came here to Honolulu to live with my older widowed sister, Beatrice. Beatrice had moved to Honolulu years before with her husband and had stayed on after her husband died.”
“Then you moved here to be with Chloe after they released you from prison?”
“Not right away,” Ken said. “Back then I was obsessed with proving my innocence and seeing that Austin Bryce got what he had coming for framing me. But, I couldn‘t find him. He left his position at the museum a short time after the fire, left San Francisco altogether. I found a couple of people who knew him. One told me he’d heard Bryce had moved to England. The other said she thought Bryce had gone to China.”
“So, you never saw him again?”
“No, and in time I became too discouraged to continue looking. I found a job in a shipyard on Hunter’s Point and worked there until the day a crane cable snapped, and a heavy piece of equipment dropped on me. That’s how I got this.”
Ken pulled up his right trouser leg to reveal an artificial leg.
“The leg was crushed,” he said. “The doctors had to take it off above the knee. I couldn’t do the job anymore, so the company sent me away with a small disability pension.”
“Is that when you moved here?”
“Yes, I’d long since given up on finding Austin Bryce. Nothing was keeping me in California. And, my sister had taken ill with cancer. I had been afraid of facing Chloe for years, but given the circumstances, I knew I had to make a move here for her sake. Chloe was still in high school, and my sister was dying. This was her house.”
“Dad thought I’d hate him because he had gone to prison,” Chloe said. “But, I never had. Mom had always told me dad was innocent, and his awful boss had framed him for the fire.”
“Anyway, Chloe and I have lived here in Beatrice’s house ever since,” Ken said.
“I get that Bryce and Chambers have involvement in all this,” I said. “But, neither of you have told me how Tiger Ying fits into it.”
“Tiger Ying was supposedly destroyed in the museum fire sixteen years ago, reduced to a worthless hunk of melted bronze along with all the other artifacts belonging to William Chambers,” Ken said. “That is what Austin Bryce testified to at my trial.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “Tiger Ying exists. Brandi Camargo is an expert in such things and told me Tiger Ying was part of a collection of antiquities Austin Bryce consigned to her for an auction.”
“It isn’t true,” Ken said. “But, not because of what you’re probably thinking. None of those artifacts were destroyed in the fire. In prison, all I thought about was why Bryce had framed me. Then it became clear as day. Bryce had removed the artifacts from the museum storage room before he started the fire that night. I suspect he replaced them with worthless pieces of bronze, maybe even scrap bronze so it would appear they had melted in the fire. The existence of Tiger Ying goes a long way toward proving it.”
“Chloe took Tiger Ying so you could prove Bryce framed you all those years ago?” I said.
Ken said, “Exactly. Chances are some of the other pieces Bryce consigned to Brandi Camargo were also artifacts that supposedly perished in the museum fire. But, none of the others are as identifiable as Tiger Ying.”
“Why did you take Tiger Ying from the shop, Chloe?” I said. “Why not tell Brandi Camargo everything you’ve told me?”
“We didn’t know if we could trust her,” Chloe said. “Austin Bryce had been an important client of hers for years. There was the chance she knew Bryce had stolen the artifacts he wanted her to sell for him. It was possible all she wanted was the fee she would earn from the sales.”
That seemed plausible. “How did you even take the piece?” I said. “Brandi told me you didn’t have a key to the shop or the secret room where the pieces meant for auction were stored.”
Chloe’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “Lee Tran helped me,” she said. Chloe started to cry. Her father took her in his arms and comforted her. We were all silent for a while as Chloe sobbed quietly. After several minutes, Chloe regained some semblance of her composure.
“How did you know Lee Tran?” I said.
“He was my boyfriend,” Chloe said. “Lee took classes at the university during the mornings and worked nights. That’s how we met, at school. We had been dating for several months by the time Bryce delivered the consignment to the shop. I’d already told Lee all about my father being framed and sent to prison when I was a child. We first displayed the pieces in the shop. I first saw Tiger Ying when we unpacked the pieces to display them. Dad had told me all about it many times. I recognized it immediately.”
“So you made a plan,” I said.
“Yes, dad and I decided we couldn’t risk trusting Brandi. We decided we had to get hold of Tiger Ying ourselves. I invited Lee to come over. We told him about Tiger Ying, where it came from, and we all discussed it together. Lee offered to help.”
Ken passed Chloe a handkerchief, and she blew her nose before continuing.
“I worked the Monday before I took Tiger Ying. Brandi and I had been moving some things into the secret room when a client came in. She left me to finish. While she was occupied with the client, I used tape to fix the do
or so it wouldn’t lock when she turned the key. Then I closed the door and went back to the sales floor.”
“Then you and Lee went back early on that Tuesday morning?”
“Yes. Lee met me in town, and I hid in the back of his security company car. We went to Brandi’s store. Lee unlocked the front door with the company key he had. He always worked the area where the store is located, and they issued him a key ring with keys to all the businesses he patrolled at the start of every shift. He opened the door and then shut it and re-locked it to cause the alarm to activate. Less than a minute later, the burglar alarm went off and his dispatcher called him on the radio and dispatched him to the store.”
“Where you both already were,” I said.
“Yes. We waited until the Honolulu cops arrived. Then Lee unlocked and opened the door, and they all went inside. The cops were satisfied it had been a false alarm. When the cops left, we both went inside. I opened the bookshelf. Brandi hadn’t noticed I’d disabled the door lock. I pulled the door right open. I went into the secret room, opened the packing crate containing Tiger Ying and took it. I removed the tape from the lock, and the door locked automatically when I closed it. We went out. Lee rearmed the alarm and locked up. Then Lee drove me back to my car.”
“Where is Tiger Ying now?” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Ken said.
He got up and went into another room. When he returned, he was carrying a bronze vessel, tarnished with age. It had a tiger on top, a tiger on the handle, and carved images of tigers and ancient hunters cast into the body. It looked exactly like the photo Brandi Camargo had shown me. It was Tiger Ying.
“You’ve both put me in a difficult position,” I said.