Brian had met Nicole when she was a rising star at Carter and Wells, one of the largest law firms in the Dallas metroplex. Her specialty was criminal defense work and it had come in handy once for Brian when he was a stockbroker in Dallas. She had represented some of America’s largest corporate and banking executives and had steered them, almost a hundred percent successfully, through fraud, insider trading, stock manipulation and dozens of other charges the federal government had in its arsenal. Brian started out as a client too, then ended up as her romantic partner.
In the past couple of years Nicole had risen quickly in her firm and although she was only in her mid-thirties, she had become one of Carter and Wells’ star performers. She earned nearly a million dollars a year and was the youngest full partner ever elected to the firm.
Carter and Wells had a New York office and Nicole was licensed to practice in the state. That had happened several years ago when she began to specialize in white-collar criminal law. New York was where many Federal criminal lawsuits were filed since the major stock exchanges were headquartered here and the Securities and Exchange Commission had a very active branch in Manhattan.
As he finished his drink Brian responded. “Having a martini at the Oak Bar. Wish you were here. Seriously. Can’t wait until I see you in two weeks.”
He called for his check, paid it and headed for the door, putting on his coat as he stepped outside. The wind had died down since he arrived. He decided to take a brief stroll in Central Park before heading home. He jaywalked across the street and entered the park at 59th and Fifth, chose an empty, mostly-dry bench and sat for a few minutes, watching people pass by and enjoying the beauty and serenity of the park on a cool March evening after a downpour.
He replayed the afternoon with Arthur Borland. Finally he glanced at his watch and saw that over a half hour had passed while he was lost in thought about Captain Jack’s exploits. Brian walked back to Central Park South. When he looked toward the broad fountain area in front of the Plaza Hotel he could see that Fifth Avenue was blocked off south of 57th Street. Traffic headed south was backed up for blocks and policemen diverted cars onto 57th in both directions. Brian walked down Fifth until he reached the barricaded area. Pedestrians were still moving on the west side of the street but more barriers blocked the east sidewalk. As he got a block closer Brian saw that there were several police cars and an ambulance parked in the street directly in front of his gallery. He began to run, sprinting the two blocks and heading across the street. At the barricade a policeman told him he could go no further.
“That’s my gallery,” he shouted. “What’s going on?”
The policeman took Brian’s arm and moved him around the barrier. “See that officer standing in the doorway? Go identify yourself to him.”
Brian ran the half block and pulled out his business card and driver license. Breathlessly he said, “I’m Brian Sadler. I own this gallery. What’s happening?”
The officer motioned him aside as two paramedics pushed a gurney through the showroom. When it emerged on the sidewalk, Brian looked down at Collette Conning. Her face was bloody and he could see a large gash in her forehead.
“Collette! My God. What happened?”
A medic said, “She shouldn’t talk. She’s in shock.”
She looked up at him, her face contorted, terror-stricken. “I…why, Brian? Why? The box was already locked up.” Then her eyes closed and the men moved her quickly to the waiting ambulance.
He grabbed the medic’s sleeve. “Is she going to be OK? Where are you taking her?”
“We’re sending her vitals to Lenox Hill so the doctor will be ready when she gets there. She’s had a traumatic injury and we need to move her as quickly as possible.” The back doors closed, the men rushed to the front and, as police cleared the way, the ambulance moved away from the curb, siren wailing.
Brian returned to the gallery’s front door. “Who can I talk to about what’s going on?” he asked the uniformed officer blocking the entrance. The officer pointed to to a man in a dark suit that was in the front showroom on a cell phone. Other people were taking pictures and doing measurements, mostly in the back of the showroom where Collette’s desk and the vault were located.
Brian walked to the vault as the man in the suit noticed him and yelled, “Hey! Who are you?” Brian saw the gold shield pinned to his jacket lapel.
“Are you the owner?”
Brian answered affirmatively.
The cop pulled out a card, handed it to Brian and said, “I’m Detective Ron Calvin. What’s your name?” Brian told him, and Detective Calvin asked if the gallery was under video surveillance. Brian told him that video monitoring was done by an offsite company so although it would take some time, the service could email the surveillance video file to him in a few hours.
The cop asked if he could get on that quickly. From his desk drawer Brian took a card with the name and contact information for the monitoring company and gave it to the detective, who handed the card to another officer and said, “Find out how soon we can get today’s video.”
Brian said, “I was on my way home and saw the commotion. I just left here a couple of hours ago. How did you get through the front door? What happened?”
“The front door wasn’t locked. We were able to talk to Miss Conning for a few minutes before they took her away. It’s pretty sketchy – she had apparently been ready to close the store but then had to put something away in a time-lock vault. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. I stopped by and left her a box I’d gotten at a meeting. I wanted it to be locked up for the night so she agreed to stay to open the vault.” Walking to the huge door, he saw it was locked. He entered a six-digit numeric sequence on the keypad.
“It’ll take twenty minutes,” Brian told the detective.
“She’s in quite a bit of shock and seemed terrified. From what I gather someone apparently came to the front door and either the door wasn’t locked or she let him in. We aren’t sure and she couldn’t remember. She’s had a blow to her head and may never recall everything. We can just hope in a few days most of it comes back. Anyway, she had just locked the vault. I didn’t find out much after that. She was confused and not making sense.”
“Now I understand what happened,” Brian said. “The panic alarm. She hit the alarm. That’s why the door isn’t locked.”
“Tell me how that works.”
“The front door is never unlocked. Collette can open it with a buzzer on her desk but people on the street can’t just walk in. If someone wants in she can communicate through a microphone at her desk linked to a speaker next to the front door buzzer outside. But there’s one way the door can be left unlocked. There are buttons all over the store in accessible places that will trigger our silent alarm. My employees also wear wristbands that have a button. When you hit the panic alarm the front door disarms so that a responding officer can get inside.”
The detective replied, “We figure the perpetrator left the store just moments before a foot patrolman from 55th Street arrived on the scene. He found no sign of forced entry and Miss Conning lying on the floor bleeding from head wounds. Now let’s sit down and let me get some information.”
He gave the officer his address, cell phone number and private line at the office. Then he started from the beginning, explaining how his ownership of the gallery happened after Darius Nazir’s suspicious death not that long ago. Brian had in fact inherited the gallery, moving from Dallas to New York to run it. Collette Conning had been Nazir’s assistant – Brian had inherited her knowledge and was thankful every day she was here.
“She’s my right hand man,” he continued, explaining he’d been at an offsite meeting with a client all afternoon. He said he came back, caught Collette on the way out and she agreed to stay and open the vault.
“OK,” the detective said thoughtfully. “Then it was either someone she knew or someone who convinced her he had a reason to be inside. Any ideas about who that might have be
en?”
“Nothing specific, although it could have been someone she’s been working with, or a friend of hers or mine…there’s almost no telling. There’s also Jason, my other assistant. Today’s his day off but he might have come by. He wouldn’t have done this, though. I can’t imagine who would, or why.”
“Does she have an appointment calendar that could give me an idea who’s been in the store in the past few days? There’s one more thing, Mr. Sadler. With all respect, sir, one person she would definitely have let in is you. My job is to rule out everyone. We need to know where you’ve been all afternoon. I hope you weren’t alone. It’ll make my life and yours a lot easier.” He smiled grimly at Brian, who didn’t smile back.
Brian had been in this position before, under suspicion by the authorities, and although he felt secure since the staff at the Oak Bar knew him by name he still got really uncomfortable when this sort of thing happened. He knew it was just the cop’s job to tie down every possibility and eliminate everyone, hopefully leaving only the bad guy at the end. He told the detective that he had been at the Monument Club all afternoon, having lunch and meeting with a client. That would certainly be easy enough to confirm, Brian knew.
“I went to the Oak Bar about 5:30, sat in the park for a few minutes afterwards and then I saw the commotion so I came down to see what was going on here. Call Frank, the headwaiter who took my coat, or Sandy, the bartender. They’ll both tell you I was at the bar. And here’s my credit card receipt. It’s probably got a time stamp on it.”
The detective wrote the information in a little pad he took from his pocket and followed Brian to Collette’s desk. He put the receipt from the bar in his pocket. “I’ll keep this for now. No offense. Just doing my job.”
“I got it,” Brian responded curtly. “Let’s just concentrate on things that might solve this crime instead of things that won’t.”
One thing that Brian had kept to himself so far was the comment Collette made before she was put in the ambulance. She had asked why twice and then said the box was already locked up. She had looked terrified. What did all that mean? He decided to keep that to himself for now. If Collette could talk to the police tomorrow they would know much more. In the meantime Brian wanted a little time to digest that information.
He shuffled through her papers and came up with Collette’s appointment book. In the gallery business, the volume of customers wasn’t as important as the value of what they wanted to purchase or consign. Bijan Rarities sometimes had twenty clients in a day. More often it was less than ten. Today was like that – there had been only six, two before Brian left for lunch at noon, then four in the afternoon. The last one had been around four pm, a little over an hour before Brian had come by the gallery and dropped off Arthur Borland’s box.
“I know every name on this list,” Brian told Detective Calvin. “They’re all repeat clients except one, and that one I met with myself this morning to discuss his consigning an Etruscan vase for us to sell.”
The policeman assigned to retrieve the surveillance video motioned to the detective. He stepped away and Brian watched the uniformed cop speak quietly. When he came back he said, “Apparently you have to receive the download of the video first unless we have a search warrant. The monitoring company just sent you an email with an authorization for the video to simultaneously be released to me. I presume you’re willing to assist us, Mr. Sadler. If so, you need to print this release, sign it and email it back.”
Brian went to his office, entered his password and opened email. He found the document, signed, scanned and returned it. The monitoring company said the video would be emailed within two hours.
Brian spent the next half hour giving the detective a summary of each of the six clients’ backgrounds and how to contact them. He couldn’t think of anything that would remotely tie any of today’s visitors to what appeared to be an attempted robbery. He just wondered how someone would have figured out so quickly that Brian had the box, if in fact that was what the intruder had wanted at all. Maybe Collette had just been rambling in shock and maybe she just fixated on the thing that kept her there after hours – Brian’s artifact that had to go into the vault. But something nagged at the back of Brian’s mind. Maybe it was the box they were after. If so, why?
A quiet chime notified Brian that the vault was ready to be opened. He turned the combination lock, entered another numeric sequence and lowered a large handle. The massive door swung open. Like a bank vault, just inside the doorway was a wall completely made out of steel bars. It was like a jail cell with a locked door in the middle. Brian took a key from Collette’s desk and opened that secondary door. He and Detective Calvin stepped inside.
The vault had a large open area where a number of items were, some on individual pedestals, others on tables or a wire rack shelf along one wall. Most were ancient relics or examples of art from early cultures. In a back room other shelves had cubbyholes to store smaller things. With every item was an information card.
The box Brian had given Collette sat inconspicuously on a table near the vault’s door. It looked as though she’d been under no stress when she set it on the table – it was arranged neatly and very straight just as he would expect from Collette. Then she would simply have closed the barred door, which locks automatically, and finally shut the huge vault door. Although the latter weighed over a ton it moved seamlessly on huge bearings and a simple push closed it. Even a small person like Collette could have easily done it in one minute.
“How does everything look?” Detective Calvin asked.
“Exactly as it should. Here’s the artifact I brought back around five and gave to Collette. It’s right here, exactly where it should be.” He opened the box and verified its contents. “All here.”
“Let’s talk about that little box, where you got it and whether it might have anything to do with this investigation.”
At his desk Brian told some of the story of Captain Jack Borland. He explained that the box contained the copy of a letter from the archives in Seville, Spain and two gold sheets. Brian said he knew nothing about the sheets. “That’s part of what Lord Borland asked me to check out.” He omitted the fact that Borland had said the sheets were Mayan and had been found in Oklahoma.
The detective took copious notes and it was nearly eight pm when he said, “I guess we’re done for tonight. Here’s my card. Please look at the surveillance video the minute you get it – I will too. Call me immediately if you know who the person is that Miss Conning let in. And any other time you think of anything I might need to know.” He gathered his coat, walked to the front of the store where a uniformed officer stood, and they left in a squad car parked at the curb.
Brian went through Collette’s papers, making sure he knew what was on tap for tomorrow at the gallery, while he waited for the monitoring company’s email. By the time it came he was bone-tired. All he wanted to do was finish up here and go home. Reviewing the video could take hours – he could do it easily from home. Forty minutes later he was ready to go. He locked and armed the front door and hailed a taxi, too exhausted to walk.
On Fifth Avenue traffic flowed as if nothing had ever happened. That was New York – even after major problems the city quickly reverted to “normal”, whatever that meant. There were always too many pushy pedestrians, too much traffic and loud noise. All those things made this city the exciting place it was twenty-four hours a day.
Brian was worried about Collette. From what he had seen, her injuries might be really serious and he hoped it wasn’t his fault. He just couldn’t figure something out. The vault was locked down tight, exactly as it would have been any other night. She had put the box on the table, shut the inside gate and closed the huge vault door. If she had done all that the intruder must not have arrived until after the door was locked. Did he attack her in furious desperation because he couldn’t get in the vault? Or was he after something else?
Brian recalled Collette looking at him in terror, saying the wo
rd why twice. What was that about? Brian hoped Collette would be able to remember.
Chapter Twelve
As the cab snaked through traffic Brian called Nicole and told her about his day. She tried to make Brian feel better, sensing the stress as he recounted first the attack on Collette then the story about Captain Jack Borland. At the end, trying to lighten his spirits, she said, “Well, if you need a good lawyer, baby, I know where you can get one! And she’s cheap…well, not cheap exactly but for you it won’t cost you in cash. I have other ways of making you pay, if you know what I mean.” She laughed and so did he. But after the call ended Brian had a new concern. He’d needed a good lawyer once before. Hopefully he wouldn’t need one this time.
He placed a call to Lenox Hill Hospital and learned Collette was in ICU and stable. He spoke briefly to the duty nurse who said she’d pass along his concerns to her parents.
When the taxi pulled up at the towering building where Brian lived in the Upper 80’s off Amsterdam, he saw a black car parked at the curb with a man at the wheel. Brian saw Detective Calvin talking to the doorman.
“What are you doing here?” Brian asked.
“Obviously you haven’t seen the surveillance video.” The detective’s demeanor was far more serious than when questioning Brian earlier.
“No. I locked up the gallery, caught a cab and came home. I saw I got it but decided I’d look at it here at home.”
Brian Sadler Archaeological Mysteries BoxSet Page 30
