The Mask of Atreus Read online

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said, frowning.

  “Nothing like it in the collection?”

  “No.”

  “The swastika isn’t relevant,” he added after a moment. “It’s just the shape of the weapon that we’re trying to match.”

  It was Keene’s turn to shoot his colleague a look, though Deborah wasn’t sure what it contained. Puzzlement? Doubt?

  Deborah opened her mouth to speak, but there was another tap on the door, brisker this time, followed by the appearance of one of the uniformed cops.

  “There’s a guy here to see Miss Miller,” he said. “Says he’s Dixon’s lawyer.”

  Deborah stared. She didn’t know any lawyer, didn’t even know Richard had had one, though she supposed he must have.

  “Dixon’s dead,” said Keene. “He don’t need no damn lawyer.”

  There was something in his tone, something about the way he looked back to her.

  “Am I a suspect?” said Deborah.

  “Of course not,” said Cerniga, cutting in. Keene looked at the floor.

  “Also,” said the uniform, “I’ve got word from the patrolmen who checked out her place. Nothing. No sign of forced entry or a search.”

  Keene regarded Deborah with interest.

  “What?” said Deborah. “You think that means I imagined it?”

  “It has been a very stressful evening for you,” he said, too kindly. “But I didn’t mean you imagined it, no.”

  He gave her a sly grin, and she felt her color rise.

  “You think I made it up?” she said, baffled. “I thought I wasn’t a suspect?”

  “Lady,” said Keene, “everyone’s a suspect till someone’s convicted.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” said Deborah, feeling that thickness again, that stupid slowness like she was drunk or sedated. “You think I killed Richard?”

  “Hey, lady, I’m just saying.”

  “Please stop just saying,” she said, some of her old defiance flashing up through her confusion. “I don’t understand what you mean by it. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t call me lady.”

  “That,” he said, looking her up and down with clumsy irony, “will be no problem at all.”

  Deborah just looked at him. She felt out of her depth. In fact that phrase made sense to her in ways it never had before. She was floating out to sea. The water was dark and cold beneath her, and there were things down there with teeth, watching, circling…

  “One other thing,” said the uniform. “That John Doe: the shooting?”

  “What about it?” said Cerniga.

  “He had a couple of personal effects in an inside pocket. The writing on them is foreign. Greek, maybe.”

  “Greek?” said Cerniga.

  “Maybe,” said the cop. “They weren’t sure. They’re checking it out.”

  “If he turns out to be a foreign national, won’t that just be perfect?” said Keene, his expression sour.

  “Maybe we should have you look at him,” said Cerniga to Deborah. “See if you’ve seen him around.”

  “Because he’s Greek and there’s a room full of old Greek crap upstairs?” said Keene in a tone of scornful disbelief. “You think that’s a connection?”

  “Probably not,” said Cerniga. His eyes narrowed, and he turned to Deborah. “Did you know that Mr. Dixon made a series of long-distance calls to Greece in the past two weeks?”

  “No,” said Deborah honestly.

  “Do you know why he may have done so?”

  “No,” said Deborah miserably.

  More secrets.

  Cerniga sighed and considered the uniformed cop.

  “It’s probably not connected,” he said, “but let’s check out the other victim.”

  “It’s not our case,” said Keene, petulant now. “We have enough on our plate without making these dumb-ass links from one stiff—wealthy, stab wounds, indoors—to another—homeless, gun shot, outdoors!”

  “He was homeless?” asked Deborah, remembering the strange lurker in the parking lot.

  “Probably,” said Cerniga, “we don’t know for sure—”

  Without warning, the door kicked open and a tall, young, blond man came in. He was slim and wore a pale, rumpled suit with a stone-colored shirt, open at the throat. He looked like a man unused to being messed about.

  “Miss Miller?” he said, ignoring the cops completely, “I’m Calvin Bowers. I was Mr. Dixon’s lawyer. Since I’m responsible for his estate—including the museum—I thought I would offer my services.”

  His eyes were a deep, unsettling blue, almost purple in their intensity.

  “Miss Miller has not been charged,” said Cerniga, getting to his feet and shooting Keene an irritated look.

  “Just as well,” said Bowers, his blue eyes flashing dangerously in Cerniga’s direction. “But this is Miss Miller’s second extended interrogation in a few hours, and on the night she found the body of her mentor. I think that any evidence you gathered in such circumstances would be considered of questionable reliability, wouldn’t you? I’m damned sure a jury would.”

  “Now you just hold it right there,” said Keene, rising.

  “Are you in charge of this investigation?” Bowers shot back.

  The question seemed to give Keene pause, and his righteous certainty flickered. He looked at Cerniga.

  “I am,” said Cerniga. “Can we get back to the matter of the intruder at Miss Miller’s apartment—?”

  “An intruder?” said Bowers, his eyes turning to Deborah. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, tense, wondering who he was, why he seemed to be taking her part.

  “I got out before I even saw him.”

  Keene grinned.

  Bowers rounded on him. “If I find that you’ve created a hostile interrogation environment for this witness,” he said, “I’ll have her entire testimony thrown out. Is that clear?”

  Keene’s sneer wilted, and though it didn’t completely vanish, he shrugged his assent.

  “I want to make it clear,” said Cerniga, “that Miss Miller is being interviewed, not interrogated.”

  “Have you determined the motivation for the attack on Mr. Dixon?” said Bowers, still on the offensive.

  “Not yet,” said Cerniga. He was catching some of his colleague’s surliness now. “We think it might be a burglary gone wrong but…” He faltered.

  “Yes?” said Bowers, reeling him in.

  “We don’t know if there is anything missing.”

  “This, no doubt, has been the subject of your questioning of Miss Miller,” said Bowers. “Presumably she has been going through the museum properties to determine if anything is unaccounted for.”

  “We haven’t got to that yet, sir,” said Cerniga.

  Bowers couldn’t suppress the hint of a smile. Was it that “sir” or just the ease with which he had pulled the rug out from under Cerniga’s feet?

  He turned to her, smiling.

  “Miss Miller, might you have a complete inventory of the museum’s contents?” he said. “It might aid the police in their inquiries and give them something other than you to scrutinize.”

  The two cops sat quite still as Deborah rose and unlocked a filing cabinet.

  CHAPTER 13

  Deborah sat with Calvin Bowers in the museum lobby, which now glowed with incongruous morning sunshine. Richard was dead, but the sun still shone. It was the way of things, she supposed, but it felt wrong, and she hated it. There was a uniformed officer standing by the locked front door, but the detectives were still in the office.

  Bowers, out of the police presence, was a different person: relaxed, open faced, amiably handsome. He sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, casual in the way a big cat is casual, elegant but poised for action. She didn’t feel like making conversation, and his easy good looks made her awkward and unsure of herself, but he had helped her out, and it seemed churlish to just sit there.

  “How long have you worked for Richard?” she asked.

  “Less than a year. He has done business with our firm for a lot longer than that, of course. Since he bought this place, I think. But I only got involved a few months ago when he sent some paperwork our way. We spoke on the phone a few times and exchanged legal correspondence, but we’d never actually met.”

  Deborah was impressed. His righteous outrage in the office a few minutes ago had led her—and the police—to assume that Bowers was an old friend of Richard’s, that he was personally affronted by the crime and its subsequent handling. But all that had been professional bluster to keep them off balance. His interest in the case was strictly professional.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” said Deborah. As soon as the words were out there in the sun, she regretted saying them, especially to this stranger. “Sorry,” she added hastily. “That was such a cliché. It doesn’t begin to… God, there’s so much work to be done.”

  Bowers rolled with her change of tack as if he hadn’t noticed it.

  “There are people who can help shoulder the burden, aren’t there?” he said. “The museum board? I would be glad to help out. My relationship with Mr. Dixon was brief, but the firm’s goes back a long way and is tied to the value of the property itself, so I’m sure they’ll be glad to lend my aid.”

  Lend my aid. He sounded like a knight offering chivalric services to a damsel in distress.

  “I can handle things here,” she said with a touch of hauteur. It was a reflex. She didn’t even know that she could handle things.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said, smiling so that she relented a little.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not used to…”

  …being anything other than utterly self-reliant?

  “…being l
ooked after,” she said. “Richard gave me free rein…”

  She caught herself, sensing a tightening in her throat. She smiled and shrugged it off unconvincingly. He just nodded his sympathy, and for a moment she looked out over the lobby she and Richard had assembled piece by painstakingly selected piece…

  “So you’re an archaeologist,” he said, peering at the Creek Indian exhibit critically.

  “Not really,” said Deborah. “I’m a museum director. That’s what my graduate degree is in.”

  “And what does a museum director major in?” he said, smiling easily again so that she felt herself relax a fraction.

  “I double majored in English and archaeology,” she said, “but a lot of people do business.”

  “I prefer it your way round,” he said.

  “So do I,” she said, and this time her smile was warmer.

  “Still,” he said, indicating the case containing a magnificent stone-headed tomahawk. “The company you keep! Look at this nasty little thing. A barbarous weapon if ever there was one. I guess there’s something to be said for Manifest Destiny, eh?”

  “I don’t think the Native Americans were any less civilized than the white settlers because they had less efficient ways of killing people,” she said with an ironic smile.

  “Native Americans he said. “Funny isn’t it, the way people think they can fix everything with words.”

  Deborah felt a flicker of irritation but didn’t have time to respond.

  “Miss Miller?” It was Tonya.

  She had emerged from the long gallery to the residence and was hovering, her hands clasped awkwardly in front of her.

  “Can I have a word?” she said.

  Deborah got up.

  “In private, if you don’t mind,” Tonya said.

  Deborah gave an apologetic nod toward Bowers, and the two women walked back to the museum office in silence.

  “What’s on your mind, Tonya?” said Deborah after they had closed the door behind them. They were both standing, stiff and apprehensive.

  “I think you know,” said Tonya. “Look,” she said. “I was just curious. I have a buddy in the force, and he told me about the murder as soon as the call came through. He said something about a secret room and… I kinda wanted to see what was going on, you know? I didn’t think it would be Mr. Dixon. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  Deborah didn’t know Tonya well, but she had spoken to her enough for that last phrase to ring strangely. Tonya didn’t talk like a janitor, and she didn’t wear her blackness on her sleeve. Her diction was, Deborah had often observed, carefully grammatical, educated, so that she had often wondered from what white-collar profession she had fallen to wind up cleaning out museum toilets. She spoke so that everyone knew that they had no right to look down on her for what she did or what she looked like. The Tonya Deborah knew would never say, “I didn’t mean nothing by it,” and the phrase somehow threw the entire confession into a strange and uncertain light.

  “You probably shouldn’t have come in till the police arrived,” said Deborah wearily.

  “No ma’am,” said Tonya, shaking her head, as if amazed by her own audacity. “That’s surely right.”

  No feisty riposte, no carefully worded suggestion as to what the prim white bitch could do with her suspicions. “No ma’am, that’s surely right”?

  From Tonya? No way.

  Deborah’s eyes narrowed. It was like casting extras in Gone With the Wind.

  “You want I should get you a coffee?” said Tonya, after a sigh of relief. “I was fixing to make one, but my guts was all knotted up. I think I could drink me something now.”

  Deborah managed a smile and a nod, and watched her go with a mixture of disbelief and unease. “My guts was all knotted up”? Who was she trying to fool, and why?

  When she got back into the lobby, Calvin Bowers was talking to a big man in a shiny suit: Harvey Webster. Her heart sank, but she kept her chin up and walked briskly toward them.

  Webster looked serious, but his face lit up as he saw her coming. He showed no ill effects from the evening’s alcohol or the fact that she had turned him out on his ear.

  “Terrible business,” he said as she arrived, his voice low and gently musical. “Just terrible. If there’s anything I can do, you just holler.”

  “Thank you, Harvey,” said Deborah. “I will.”

  “The police called me first thing,” he said. “Said we should close the museum.”

  “What?” said Deborah. “For how long?”

  “Not long,” he said. “Two, maybe three weeks.”

  “Three weeks!” said Deborah.

  “Maybe we can talk them into opening sooner,” said Bowers, inserting himself into the conversation in full damsel-protecting mode.

  “Seemed pretty firm,” said Webster. He gave Deborah a sympathetic smile which did not reach his watery eyes.

  So this was to be her punishment. Webster and the board would take over, shut her out for the next few weeks while they regrouped. She looked into Harvey Webster’s blandly disingenuous smile, and she thought she could glimpse her future: the steady reduction of her control of the collection until Harvey’s League of Christian (white) Businessmen could take over, and the museum would become what they had always wanted: a species of theme park, light on content, heavy on profits.

  “I’m going to have a word with those detectives,” said Webster as he walked away. “See what I can do.”

  Get the place closed for an extra month, probably, thought Deborah, feeling outmaneuvered.

  Deborah turned away, suddenly very tired and frustrated by that feeling of powerlessness which she hated above all things. She could sense Bowers behind her, ready to say something encouraging. She stood with her hands on her hips, staring across the bright, empty foyer. Without Richard, she really was alone, and the building felt no more than a shell, vacant and pointless without him.

  Three weeks. All the promotional work for the new exhibits, the glad-handing, the schmoozing and elbow rubbing, the polite smiling through story after story by benefactors, the press coverage pictures of that ghastly ship prow… All for nothing. In three weeks Atlanta would have forgotten the museum existed. And what would she do for three weeks? Bounce around in this carefully lit mausoleum while Keene and his cronies made third-hand wisecracks about homo erectus?

  God, what a wearying idea.

  “We might be able to get the museum open earlier if you can demonstrate that nothing’s missing,” said Calvin. He was hovering behind her, keeping a respectful distance. She turned and smiled gratefully.

  “I’m not entirely sure why I want to keep it open so badly,” she said. “I guess part of me thinks that if I pretend everything is normal, then somehow…”

  “Yes,” said Calvin, sparing her the end of the sentence.

  Deborah took a breath and tried to shake the thought off.

  “I can do a thorough inventory today,” she said, “make sure everything is where it should be. Of course, if there was anything missing from that room behind the bookcase in Richard’s room, I wouldn’t know.”

  She shrugged and sighed, finding the memory of the place insist itself on her memory like a familiar and unpleasant odor, the body laid out like that under the lights…

  Wait.

  Something was missing.

  The pot had come from the open display behind the bookcase, and the other cases all looked complete, so she had assumed nothing had been taken. But then there was the curious lighting in that secret room, the square of light shining down from the ceiling, throwing its chill glow on Richard’s ravaged body. But what had been there when his poor corpse was not, which needed such special illumination?

  There had been a power outlet in the center of the floor, she remembered.

  Yes. There had been another display in the center of the room. It had been large, and it had been special, the centerpiece of the collection, big enough that it had been wheeled out, tracking oil onto the carpet… But what could possibly be so much more extraordinary than the pieces stored in the wall cases, that it was worth taking while the rest of that priceless hoard had not been?

  CHAPTER 14

  “You feel up to a trip to the morgue?”

  This from Detective Cerniga. Deborah sat there mute. She had been en route to the office, but he had flagged her down. She couldn’t think of anything to say.