Privy to the Dead (13 page)

“Sure, why not?” I thought Marty must be leading up to some point, and I was in no rush.

“They were often made from mahogany, with reinforced brass corners. Early ones had drop-down handles—I guess later they kind of streamlined them with inset handles, which makes sense if you're traveling with them. Bottom line, these weren't necessarily pretty parlor pieces—these were mostly made for business. Think of them as the briefcases of their day.”

“Okay, that's nice,” I said.

“Ah, but there's more. Thomas Jefferson had one he said he designed himself before the Continental Congress in 1776. A little presumptuous, since we know there were plenty in England, but maybe he wanted a colonial product, or wanted to control the design. His had a folding top and a drawer on one end.”

“You're not going to tell me that's the one the Society had, I hope?”

“Nah, it's safely tucked away at the Smithsonian. Impeccable provenance—he made a gift of it to his granddaughter, and her descendants gave it to the nation in 1880. Anyway, what's more important for our purposes is that Jefferson asked a Philadelphia cabinetmaker to execute his plan for his so-called writing box. A man named Benjamin Randolph, who set up shop here in Philadelphia in 1764 and did well enough that he moved to a bigger place on Chestnut Street.”

I was about to ask why Marty was telling me this, but
I realized I could guess. “Don't tell me: this Randolph made furniture for John Terwilliger.”

She gave me a thumbs-up sign. “He did. Plus he left good records of the Terwilliger sales, which we've got right here at the Society. He closed up shop and retired in 1778.” Marty paused, and when she finally spoke she enunciated very clearly. “Randolph made a lap desk or campaign chest or whatever the heck you want to call it for General John Terwilliger, along with a lot of other furniture.” She waited one beat, two. “There is no record that any such item was ever in the Society's collections. Nor any record that a member of the Terwilliger family sold it, at least not publicly. It appears in the general's will, when he dies, and in a couple of heirs' later wills. Unfortunately some of the family stopped making detailed inventories in the later nineteenth century.”

She lapsed into silence, which gave me time to work through what she had just told me. Marty had confirmed that lap desks were in general use in the later 1700s, and that was the date we had tentatively assigned to the hypothetical box we had found in the pit. Some of those lap desks did have drawers with handles. That was good. We could point to a link between such a box and a Philadelphia craftsman who had made pieces for the Terwilliger family, at the right time and the right place, and there was proof that he'd sold one to General John. Also good. And Terwilliger family records showed that Marty's grandfather had included a lap desk in his personal inventory. Odds were good that it was the same one. But it had never appeared in the Society's acquisition records, although all the other items the family had donated were well documented.

I looked Marty squarely in the eye. “You're not going to try to tell me there were two boxes, are you?”

“Nope. The broken bits we found must have come from the original lap desk. But that doesn't tell us squat about why it ended up in that pit in pieces,” Marty said reluctantly.

“So what do we do now?”

“I have no idea.”

“So do we back up and start over?” I suggested. “Reverse ourselves and say that the brass
didn't
come from that particular lap desk but could have come from something else altogether? Or that we're barking up the wrong tree and the desk didn't contain something important? It was there—in pieces—because some workman probably broke it sometime in 1907 and dumped the pieces into the convenient hole and hoped no one would notice, and nobody did.”

“So why is that man dead?” Marty said.

“He drank too much on payday, then got into a brawl with a stranger, who led him into a dark alley and beat him up and then shoved him in front of a car?”

“You think the police haven't thought of that? Besides, nothing was taken, except maybe that escutcheon,” Marty snapped back.

“Of course they have—that's what they do. Of course that's the answer they'd like—it's simple. I'm surprised that
the detective even went to the trouble of asking the bartender if he recognized that piece of brass. And I bet she was surprised when he did. But she did, which tells me that she still has some suspicions about the death. It still might have had nothing to do with Carnell Scruggs's death. And I'm sure she and her people have looked for the other guy at the bar, but there's not a lot to work with there.”

“What about street cameras?” Marty asked, sitting up straighter.

“She said the coverage between the bar and here was lousy. What are you thinking?” I countered.

Marty leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I see two possibilities. One, this was a chance encounter at the bar—guy wanders in, sees the other guy with something interesting, goes out with him, and whacks him for reasons related or not to the brass thing—maybe Carnell was flashing his pay for the day. The second one is that the guy in the bar knew about whatever Carnell had found in the pit and staged the accidental meeting at the bar, then killed him and took it. All we really know is that Carnell had the thing, he died, and then he didn't have the thing.”

Marty had raised a troubling idea. “Wait—back up,” I said. “Why would mystery guy know Carnell had it? Or care?”

“Maybe you should be asking, who else knew about it at all?”

I didn't like the direction this was going. “You mean, like the rest of the construction crew?”

“Yeah. Maybe Carnell was the first to claim it, but maybe somebody else saw him pick it up and knew what it was.”

Was this getting a bit too far-fetched? “But that would mean that one of the construction crew could recognize a piece of antique brass hardware
and
had some reason to care.”

“That's just one scenario. I didn't say it was a good one.” Marty didn't seem miffed by my criticism. “Or it could have been someone else. The contractor. The architect—he must have checked in with the crew to make sure everything was ready to begin the new work. Or someone on the staff here.”

That last one hit me like a punch in the gut. “I can't imagine who would be interested—except maybe you, Marty. I wouldn't have known what I was looking at, at least until it was cleaned up.”

“I'm not about to point any fingers,” Marty said. “All I'm saying is that if Hrivnak looked at street cam footage for that night, between here and that bar, she might see
someone
following our dead guy from this end, even if she couldn't tell who it was.”

That was not a reassuring thought. “There are always people on the street. And I'm not exactly in a position to ask her, you know. She's already given me more information than she had to.”

“You told her what we suspect, when you gave her the brass bits?”

“No, I didn't. I didn't think she'd be very interested in our rather fragile string of hypotheses.”

“But she did follow up with the bartender, which tells us something.”

“True. But I can't see her making the leaps of logic that we did.”

“You've got a point there.” Marty thought for a moment.
“There is another option,” she finally said, leveling her gaze on me.

It took me a moment to work out what she meant. “No! I will not ask James to do any favors, legally or otherwise. Besides, what could he do?”

“Get a better look at the street cam footage, or enhance it, or whatever those people do. I can ask him, leave you out of it.”

“No. Marty, that makes no difference. You're a relative and a friend and a member of the Society—your asking him is only marginally different than my asking him. You can't just treat him as a handy free pass to any kind of restricted information. It's not fair to him.” My voice kept going up, in pitch and in volume. I felt really strongly about this. I was not going to put my relationship with James at risk merely to make our crime-solving a little easier. No way. And I wouldn't let Martha Terwilliger do it, either. Unfortunately Marty usually did what Marty wanted to do.

I softened my tone. “Please, Marty—there's no need to involve him. You and I are working with the police, as we should. The FBI does not belong in this mix.”

Marty looked at me for a long moment, then her shoulders slumped. “All right, I hear you. I can see your point, even if I don't like it. So without James's help, what do we do next?”

“Go back to that first list you made. If we assume that the brass, whatever it belonged to, was why the man was killed, we know that he had the escutcheon when he went to the bar, and we have an eyewitness—the bartender. You've looked into lap desks, and that kind of piece fits what little we know. You're found a connection with the Terwilliger furniture
through the brass. You know that the same cabinetmaker made lap desks for others and made other furniture for the Terwilligers. But then we hit a brick wall. We could make an effort to find out what other pieces the furniture maker made using the same brass fittings, and who he sold them to. Henry told us they were commonly used in Philadelphia at that time. Maybe the Terwilliger connection is just a coincidence.”

“Yeah, right. You don't really believe that, do you, Nell?” Marty said.

“No, I guess I don't. Where does that leave us?”

“What about what we guess was
in
the box?”

“We're still not sure anything
was
in the box. It could have been empty. Could Henry tell if it was broken before it went into the pit, and how much earlier? All we do know is that whatever it once held—papers or objects—was not in the pit. Or it might have been in the pit but Carnell pocketed it the same way he did the escutcheon. Though, again, if it exists, whoever pushed him took it. It couldn't have been too big, because there were other people watching when he came out of the pit. So he had to be able to hide it under what he was wearing. Assuming he thought it was worth taking.” I was talking more to myself than to Marty. If there
was
something missing, what could it be?

“You have a plan?” Marty asked.

“Maybe I do, kind of through the back door. I want to look at this from the Society's perspective, and I've already started that process—I've asked Ben, Latoya, Shelby, and Eric to look at our in-house records for any Society documents about that particular time period, just before we know the pit was closed up. One”—I started ticking off points on
one hand—“how the collections were managed during the building construction. I've already asked Latoya and Ben to pull those records. Two, I've got Shelby looking into bequests and begging letters from the same period, to see if there's any reference to specific collections items in those and who they came from. Three, I've asked Eric to track down the board minutes and correspondence, to see if there was any discussion of collections. Surely if the Society owned a Terwilliger lap desk, somebody would have mentioned it somewhere?”

“Of course they would. My family kept good records, before and after they were part of the Society. You know that. The lap desk is not in the Terwilliger inventory for the gift to the Society. Look, we know that my grandfather had the lap desk at one time. We have his own inventory from when he made the first donation to the Society, and several later ones. They're in his own handwriting—I recognize it—and the lap desk is
not
included. My father followed the same path, and obviously I know his handwriting, too. I've been through his papers, and there is no mention of a lap desk. If you believe the documents, the desk was never here.”

“Marty, of course I respect your expertise here, but things happen. Maybe it was a late addition. Maybe your grandfather forgot or slipped up. And maybe this whole thing is a wild-goose chase. But it's easy enough to bring together all the documents we have relating to the construction in the early twentieth century and see if there's anything we haven't seen before, or that we misinterpreted the first time we looked at it. We've got a real asset in Ben in that regard, because he has no preconceptions.”

Marty shook her head. “I want you to be wrong, since I've been living with this stuff all my life and I'd argue I knew it inside out. But at the same time, unless we find something real, this whole thing goes away, and I don't want that, either, not until we know what really happened, if that's even remotely possible. So prove me wrong, if you can. And we'll do it the old-fashioned way, with hands-on research. And without James's help. Good enough for you?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Don't thank me. I've got a very personal stake in all this. It's my family.”

And the Society was my institution, but I didn't need to tell Marty that—and I didn't feel quite the emotional and psychological attachment to this building and what we held within it that Marty did to her multiple generations of Terwilligers.

“I understand, Marty, and I know what it means to you. Look, once everybody has collected all the bits and pieces from all over the building, let's set up somewhere central where we can spread it out and cross-reference everything. I don't know that anybody's looked at the whole picture, at least since this building opened.”

“How about at my place?” Marty asked.

I considered that. Since Marty lived alone, she had some room to spare, and it was close by. I was reluctant to let our documents out of the building, but on the other hand, it seemed like a good idea to keep what we had collected away from prying eyes. “No offense, Marty, but I'd rather keep them here. We can find a safe place for the documents.”

Marty looked frustrated, but she gave in. “I understand.
Besides, who's to say they'll take up more than one lousy folder?” She looked at her watch and leaped from her chair. “Jeez, look at the time! I'm meeting Eliot in fifteen minutes.”

“Wait just a second, Marty,” I interrupted. “If we believe your second scenario, there could be someone at the Society who knows something about what's going on. We can't afford to spread this around any more than we already have.”

“You said you talked to Latoya and Ben and Shelby. That going to be a problem?”

“When I asked them to look for the records, I specifically did
not
tell them we were looking into the murder. It was an appropriate request coming from me, and we can use the information. I can't stop them from making inferences, but I do trust those people.”

Marty gave me a searching look before responding. “So we're talking about collections management, period. Got it. I've got to run, but we'll pick this up tomorrow, and by then maybe we'll have more to work with, if people come through. Bye!”

And she was gone before I could open my mouth. Just as well: I needed to sort through what I thought and what I guessed—again. It was a moving target. I reached for my bag and pulled out a train schedule. After ten years living in Bryn Mawr I'd memorized those trains, but I hadn't yet had the chance to work out the best way to get to Chestnut Hill. The next train left in fifteen minutes, so I could just make it if I hurried.

Eric stuck his head in. “You leaving now?”

“Unless you give me a reason not to,” I replied.

“No, ma'am! Just checking to see if it was okay if I left, too.”

“You go right ahead.”

“Thanks. And I'll get onto that, uh, project you asked about first thing in the morning.”

“See you tomorrow, then. Hey, I'll walk down with you.”

The halls were empty as we went down to the first floor. I nodded at Bob, still at the desk, and Eric and I went outside. Eric turned toward the river, and I angled my way toward City Hall and Suburban Station. I caught my train with two minutes to spare, and let my mind drift for the half-hour ride.

When I reached Chestnut Hill it was beginning to grow dark. I wasn't sure what this neighborhood would be like at night, later in the year. It was lovely—residential, with large old houses and broad, well-maintained sidewalks and plenty of streetlights, but it was still within city limits.
Don't borrow trouble, Nell
.

I made the ten-minute walk home with no problems, taking the front steps quickly and letting myself in. James and I had talked briefly about the existing alarm system, but I was ambivalent about them. My former home in Bryn Mawr hadn't had one, but I'd had nothing worth stealing there. Of course, I had the same lack of valuable stuff here, but the house looked as though there
should
be good pickings, whatever the reality.

Once inside, the door locked behind me, I wondered if I'd ever be able to live up to the house's standards—or if I even wanted to. I changed into something comfortable, and since James had said he would be late, I rummaged in the refrigerator for something to eat, eventually heating up some leftovers and helping myself to a glass of wine.

While I ate I thought about the problem of “stuff.” I was
the president of a collecting institution, with literally millions of items under my care, but I had never been infected by the collecting bug. I acquired things that meant something to me, and I had inherited a few, but I had never felt the desire to surround myself with material objects, no matter what their commercial worth. What I did want was furniture that matched the general style of the house combined with comfort and convenience—a set of furniture where James and I could sprawl without worrying about spilling anything, which luckily eliminated any valuable antiques. Did such a thing exist? I hadn't yet seen anything that fit that description. But we needed
something
: I didn't plan to live surrounded by cardboard packing boxes indefinitely.