“You’re a lay brother?”
“I am.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I didn’t take the same vows.” He reached for his coffee. “And,” he added with a grin, “I sleep in a different wing.”
Val fell silent, trying to gauge the weight of Bale’s secrets. There was no way to know yet whether the tightly held information he shared was one of those weights that would grow lighter with time as she simply went on with her days—or whether it would feel like psychic lead that would nightmarishly feel bigger with each passing year, the thing she couldn’t find a way around. She felt pulled into the strange and shadowy world of Antony Bale that even Adrian didn’t know. Finally, she put it to him. “Why tell me?”
Bale nodded. “Frankly, it’s a preemptive move. You would have figured it out—the truth about the Euphorbia Adrian wanted you to see. Telling you up front, Val, is the only way I can think of to impress upon you the importance of secrecy. I need to recover the relic. Somehow there was a security breach at the abbey, and this boy Fintan took advantage of it. But why? Why? Why would a devout boy steal the holiest relic of the Crucifixion? This boy robbed us, his brothers in Christ, made off with the reliquary, impulsively hid it in an urn, which he then lost, and ultimately may have killed himself in remorse.” With that, Bale pushed himself away from the table.
“Money?” she suggested, unhappy with the notion even as she said it.
“If that’s the case, there goes one vow. Strange to say, but I’m likelier to believe our friend Fintan committed a whole raft of sins than to think he broke any of his vows.”
Val gathered her coat. “What was he like, this Fintan?”
“Smart and pious.” Bale lifted his eyebrows. “A deadly combination.”
Val buttoned her jacket. “Isn’t that you?”
“I’m smart enough. And pious enough to…” here he scratched his cheek, looking amused, “…well, fit. But this boy was plenty smart, and his mind—” Bale groped for the idea “—was the tool of his piety. If you see what I mean. Love of the Lord was what motivated him. All of his ideas seemed rolled up in how best to express that love.”
“Oh,” said Val, with sudden understanding. “Then he did it for somebody else. For some higher value. It’s the only way he would have been able to explain it to himself.”
Bale took a step back. “Ah,” he said softly while he thought it over. “A moral dilemma, you’re saying.”
She gave him a frank look. “Maybe not even such a dilemma.”
“Maybe not.” Bale stared at the floor. “Interesting.” He made a move to grab the check, but Val was faster.
“This one’s mine,” she said.
He put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “You let me offload a whole bunch of troubling information, and then you buy me dinner.”
Val smoothed down her jacket, and said lightly, “Oh, I’ll think of it as a cheap history lesson.”
When he studied her, she felt a momentary alarm at how grave he looked. “No, you won’t,” he said quietly. She could never pull off flippant, that much she knew. And that much now Adrian’s brother knew too. “Let’s go.”
Go? “Where?”
“To the crime scene,” he answered, and as the two of them made their way through the crowd to the front of Eamonn’s, Val clutched at her stomach where, at that moment, the shepherd’s pie felt like it was sliding back and forth in a cargo hold.
In the cab heading uptown, Bale explained he had heard from Homicide before Mass that the CSI team had finished the job at the Coleman-Witt, if Bale wanted to come by. The museum was open officially until nine that night—Eva Toscano had told them they absolutely had to finish packing up the last of the artifacts from the Anasazi exhibit that closed earlier that week, otherwise the insurance would run out on them and the Coleman-Witt would be high and dry—and Bale could enter through the front. “I had told Cleary I wanted some time in Adrian’s office as her next of kin.” He shot her a quick look. “I’ll face packing up her things some other time.”
“I’ll help,” Val put in.
“Thanks. But tonight I just want to see it.” The ride up Riverside Drive was strangely restful for Val. She leaned back, some small part of her settling down from the disturbance of returning to the museum where Adrian had died a day ago. The driver had on the Yankees game, bottom of the second inning, two on base, one out, low and wide—all good words—the bright happy murmuring crowd in the Bronx on a warm spring night set sweetly apart from violent death.
She opened her window a crack, noticing Bale, leaning back with his eyes closed in something that wasn’t sleep. Wasn’t even pain. His coat hanging open, his legs wide, his hands loosely folded in his lap. There were fine lines at the top of his cheekbones, and a small, hooked scar along his jaw. On some level it was the kind of face that could turn up just fine in a tangle of sheets the next morning. When she suddenly found herself wondering which vows he hadn’t made, Val winced at herself and lowered her window. A light evening breeze brought in the passing smells of fresh tar—or maybe it was brimstone.
11
The wind that snapped coat hems on the steps of St. Patrick’s didn’t make it to the Upper West Side, for which Val was grateful. It made the late afternoon seem warmer. The sun over the Hudson River was suspended at the point in its descent that you could believe there were still a lot more hours left to daylight. But in ten minutes, tops, the light would shift steadily as the sun seemed to hasten to a horizon that only meant darkness. She was grateful, too, that she and Bale headed for the grand front entrance to the Coleman-Witt—it would be a long time before she could muster either the courage or forgetfulness to use the walkway leading to the employee entrance. The walkway the killer had used in pursuit of Adrian. The walkway the paramedics had used to transport her, bloody, to the morgue.
A doorman dressed in a blue uniform murmured a brief greeting as he easily swung open one half of the great glass doors of the Coleman-Witt Museum. In what Adrian had told her was a costly renovation a decade ago, the entrance to the museum had been made to soar straight up two floors overhead to create a Great Hall, where their few fine pieces of medieval armor were housed. Ahead of them, a grandfatherly docent wearing a green double-breasted blazer was pointing out the defensive features of the breastplate on a suit of armor made five hundred years ago in Germany. Sprawled in front of him was a small group of what looked like ten-year-olds with sketch books, their hands swiping across the pages with charcoal pencils. A plump art teacher wearing a denim smock circulated, whispering suggestions. Too late for a school group, thought Val—must be one of the continuing education classes Adrian had helped start a couple of years ago.
While Bale set off to ask a guard for directions to the director’s office, Val wandered closer to the sketchers as the docent opened it up to questions. One eager boy shot up to his knees and asked if they could see the spot where that lady got topped. Val pressed her eyes shut for a second. That lady. Got topped. Adrian Bale had been quickly reduced to a sound bite on the evening news. And out here in the community, no one could hang on to her name or her accomplishments or the fact that she had people who loved the hell out of her. All anyone else would recall is that she was executed in an instant of blood and bone. Topped. Was it street language? Euphemism? Spot on? All Val knew was, the word was completely colorless, but even so she felt struck clear down to her spine. She shuddered, covering her eyes as Bale stopped alongside her.
“She’s coming out,” he told her.
Val nodded, tipping back her head to eye the beautiful gilt arches. Topped. Had the boy unknowingly hit on something she and Bale could use? Without looking at Adrian’s brother because she wanted to voice the question freely as she turned it over in her own mind, she asked the arches sweeping high over her head, “Is it possible Adrian was killed execution-style?” When Bale said nothing, she went
on, “What if we’ve got this thing wrong? What if we’re settling too fast on the urn, Antony, and the…Crown.”
“What do you mean?” he finally said, quietly.
Val turned to look at him, his hands hidden in the pockets of his long coat, his look difficult to read. “Was Adrian’s murder a hit? Was the Crown stolen—” here she slowed, trying to figure it out “—as a cover?”
After a moment of trying on that possibility, he started to shake his head. “Well,” he said finally, running his hands roughly over his scalp, “I hope to God that isn’t so, because then the Crown’s been tossed into a garbage can somewhere on Broadway by now and I’ll never get it back.”
“Antony Bale?”
Val and Bale turned at the sound of the voice. Eva Toscano was wearing a dusty rose off-the-rack suit in bouclé that looked like it had been roughed up by cats. Her eyes were glazed, her blue-framed glasses askew on her tight face, but her smile soldiered on. They shook hands, Val reminding the director of the Coleman-Witt that Adrian had introduced them at a fundraising function half a year ago. Toscano’s red hair had been sprayed into paralysis on this day after her curator’s murder, but it was the only part of the poor woman that didn’t seem twitchy with lack of sleep over what had befallen her beloved museum.
“Follow me,” she breathed, tottering on her heels, and as Bale and Val fell in beside her, Toscano expressed condolences that didn’t show any intention of stopping. Adrian Bale was superb at her job, a true expert in her field, a fine asset to the Coleman-Witt, a team player, a friend to all, kind to insects, awesome at karaoke—It wasn’t until they reached the offices corridor in the second building that she seemed to run out of items of the list, and, her trembling mouth slightly open, remembered the objective.
Toscano turned to them in a heady waft of lavender. It was a frozen moment. Finally, with her arms crossed, her fingernails picked at the bouclé of her suit jacket. “The NYPD released the…crime scene,” she finished, pressing her lips tight, clearly hating words like crime scene. And possibly even NYPD. Fine for any place outside the holy walls of this repository of beauty and brilliance. Toscano flung out a hand with great distaste as though it was an invitation to cross the River Styx, and they had unreasonably asked to go there. The place beyond.
The three of them headed down the corridor toward what Val remembered as Adrian’s office, maybe fifty feet from the side entrance, straight ahead. Leaving Bale at Adrian’s closed office door while the director found the right key, Val slipped alone to the side entrance, where she scrutinized the horizontal metal bar and then turned, spying the security camera mounted high on the left wall near the ceiling. Fixed and operational. She wished with a pang she could say the same about her best friend. Narrowing her eyes, Val tried to imagine what had happened. Adrian arriving at some godawful early hour because of jet lag, toting not only her purse, her thermal lunch tote, probably her laptop, but now also a sizeable Victorian urn clothed in layers of bubble wrap. Letting herself in with her key, a trick to shoulder and knee the door open, sidling through, careful not to jostle the gift from the prior of Burnham Norton Abbey. Slowed down with the crap of the day, slowed down with the responsibility of the urn. She slipped through, the door slowly scraping across her hip as she made it through the entrance, the door to the outside stopping short—murderously short, as it happened—of closing tight.
And with the weight of all the stuff, Adrian simply hadn’t noticed the door had failed to click. Maybe from lack of sleep, maybe from what Val knew would have been her sheer happiness to be back from her visit to Antony, ready to dig back into the world of Sumerian treasures.
Val’s mind went to the nursery rhyme, For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost. For want of a click, Adrian was lost. How easy it had been, when it came right down to it, to breach Eva Toscano’s fortress walls. Easy to get into the building, easy to shoot out the security camera, easy to find his victim in the very closest office—alone. Was there nothing that hadn’t conspired against Adrian Bale on that misbegotten day to end her life?
Val found Bale standing inside his sister’s office, the scene of her violent death, and Toscano backing toward the open door. Bale was simply looking around, studying the place, while the director of the Coleman-Witt babbled. Her eyes were suddenly behaving as though she’d sprayed them with insect repellent. She couldn’t look, she couldn’t stay, it was all, all too terrible, vile, and disgusting, and she would send Terrell to them right away, and please tell her about the final arrangements, she’d be very grateful. “Stay as long as you—” here she flung up her hands as though people made no sense to her “—like.” With that, she turned and rushed back up the corridor.
The office smelled strongly of disinfectant. While Adrian’s brother started slowly around the perimeter of the room, registering everything, Val raised the vinyl blinds and thumbed open the lock on the sash window, pushing it up to let in the fresh air.
She tried to imagine being a new hire at the Coleman-Witt, assigned to this particular office. The top desk was completely devoid of anything—no loose papers, no Jasperware urn, no inbox, stapler, whatever was within her reach from day to day—certainly nothing that contained the finest example of a Euphorbia milii they would ever in this lifetime see. Some of the things were now the temporary property of the Homicide Division. Some—just the Crown?—were in the hands of Adrian’s killer.
A single business card remained. Val picked it up.
Cleaned of the Crime
Tri-County Area
J.D. Hurley, Prop.
What CSI leaves, we do not
Bonded, Licensed, Confidential
A set of phone numbers.
Tossed on the desk as a routine last act before leaving, having cleaned up blood and bone.
To Val it felt like finding a calling card in a coffin.
She slipped it into her bag, in case she and Bale decided to call them.
Bale was turning over common objects—a Krups coffeemaker, a three-hole punch, a stack of Zagat guides—trying to get a feel for Adrian’s work life, Val thought. She stood as tightly up against the single window as she could, stepping left and right, trying to see what a random passerby on the street might possible see.
There was no vision line at all from the window to the threshold of the office door, where someone had fired at Adrian. Out of sight from the museum’s security system. Out of sight from the street.
For someone, it had been a clean kill.
But from Adrian’s desk, with the office door wide open, there was a clean vision line straight out to the corridor where she spotted the wall-mounted metal coat rack across from Adrian’s office. From the wire hangers hung a couple of white lab coats, a gray topcoat, a brown leather jacket, and a purple fleece. On the attached horizontal rack, three inches above the one holding the coats and jackets, was the red and silver thermal lunch bag Adrian had been using for the past couple of years, jammed up against other staff’s hats, umbrellas, and lunch bags. “Antony,” she said, bounding out to the hall and pulling down Adrian’s lunch bag. Clutching it in both hands, she strode back into Adrian’s office. “See this?” She held it out toward him.
He winced. “Adrian’s lunch?”
Val widened her eyes at him, excited. “No.” When he shot her a skeptical look, she went on. “Cleary mentioned they had taken her purse—the one next to her desk—as evidence, but they found nothing of interest in it. A couple of old gift cards with a couple of bucks each left on them, a change purse with a few dollars, a comb, a lipstick, old movie stubs, cheap pair of drugstore sunglasses—” Val blew the hair away from her face. “I forgot, that’s all, otherwise I could have—”
“What?” said Bale, interested.
“Remember when Adrian’s purse was snatched a couple of years ago when she was coming home late at night, right off Columbus Circle?” When Bale shook his head, Val went on
. “She lost everything and had to go through that big rigmarole of replacing all her cards. Afterwards,” Val said as she set the thermal lunch bag down on Adrian’s scrubbed and empty desk, “she was so annoyed that she put together this fake purse—an old Michael Kors bag—”
“As a kind of…decoy?”
“Right. All worthless stuff inside but with just a few bucks to pull it off, if anyone made a grab for it. And only on workdays, when she was in a crush of people during rush hour, or coming home late and the streets were deserted.”
Bale rubbed the back of his neck, glancing around Adrian’s office at the Coleman-Witt. “But where’s her driver’s license, and her wallet, and—”
With a smile, Val unzipped the lunch bag. First she pulled out a French-styled Coach wallet, opened it, and flashed the driver’s license and a line of credit cards at Bale. Fingering through the cash—which topped two hundred dollars—she found receipts, a baggage claim ticket, and a Metro card. “This is her purse,” Val said excitedly, “her real purse.” While she riffled through the receipts to see if there was anything particularly telling—found a few from the recent trip to Norfolk to visit Antony at the abbey—he pulled out Adrian’s iPad mini, clutching it with both hands for a quick second as though it might disappear as completely as Adrian herself. “I’ll bet her schedule is on the mini,” Val said, then she quickly drew out a hairbrush, compact, bottle of Advil, key ring—and a purple Moleskin notebook with an attached elastic band to keep it closed. Val slipped off the elastic and opened the book. In her bold handwriting, Adrian had scrawled, MY TRIP JOURNAL, Norfolk, U.K., and the dates. For just a quick look, Val opened the journal and thumbed to a random page about halfway through her friend’s trip to Norfolk, when her eyes settled on the words, Today I met a man.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 8