“Rosalila,” Rose explained, “is an Early Classic Mayan temple that archaeologists have dated to the reign of Moon Jaguar—around C.E. 571. It’s unusual in that it was completely preserved inside a later temple—right down to the pigment in the paint.”
“So your student docent called the NPS?” asked Veras.
Rose nodded. “Long and short of it—my partner and I were dispatched early the next morning. The museum said they had no such artifacts. We got a court order to search the premises and found nothing, but Sommers’s records showed that several crates of goods had gone missing. What was in those crates, we wondered, and who’d handled them? We put those questions to Sommers, and about a month later they coughed up a mid-level clerk who had allegedly recognized the artifacts as being stolen and—knowing that the auction house would turn them over to the authorities—decided he’d deal them to the museum himself. Since he was a Sommers employee, he could easily provide falsified paperwork that presented the artifacts as legally acquired.”
“You don’t believe that’s what really happened,” Veras observed.
Rose shrugged. “It doesn’t much matter what I believe, but no, none of us believed it for a moment. We knew the objects reached the museum; we have every reason to believe the museum staffers that received them knew they were illicit. Normally, they would have made a big deal out of acquiring such treasures. Heck, they would have advertised it, thrown a gala, used it as a fund-raising opportunity. But between the time we started our investigation and the time we acquired our warrants, the artifacts had been returned to a little-used storage room at Sommers, and a clerk had been selected to take the tumble.”
Veras shook his head. “He probably had the misfortune of being the one to sign for the crates when they arrived from wherever they arrived from. I’m sure he was well compensated for his pains. Where did they arrive from, these artifacts?”
“Can’t tell you that. Wouldn’t if I could.”
Veras was nodding thoughtfully, his brow furrowed. “Of course not. It’s a shame. As long as the real dealers can keep sacrificing bit players, they’ll just keep doing what they’re doing.”
Rose grimaced. “I doubt they’ve stopped their trafficking just because a couple of park rangers got lucky.”
She growled the r in rangers, which made me laugh out loud. Veras wasn’t laughing. In fact, he seemed not to be listening. He gathered up his machine and stowed it in a leather courier bag. Very Indiana Jones.
“Interview over?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the pre-Columbian art?”
His eyes flickered to me for a second. “The Hochob artifacts were returned to Mexico. As I said, that’s my beat. That part of the story I know, as do most of my readers. It’s this part that’s still a mystery.”
Rose shifted in her seat. “To the NPS too. There are few things as frustrating to me—to any agent—as watching the real operators get clean away while some poor toady takes the fall.”
“Alligator lizards,” murmured Veras.
“Pardon?” I said.
“You grab an alligator lizard and its tail comes off in your hand. An evolutionary adaptation.”
Rose grunted. “Apparently works for other reptilian life forms too.”
Veras shifted his attention back to her. “This matters to you a lot—this cultural thievery?”
“You know it matters. As you noted, Dr. Veras, I’m Hopi.”
“Cruz,” he corrected.
“Cruz. There’s every chance my great-grandmother’s bones are in some auction house or museum storage bin even as we speak.”
He continued to regard her intensely a moment more, then smiled. “That’s going to make a great angle for my story, Rose. Thanks.”
“Didn’t you tell him a bit much?” I asked Rose when Cruz Veras had gathered up his interview goo and disappeared.
“Honestly, other than sharing how I feel about it, I didn’t tell him anything he couldn’t glean from news stories and public court records. Notice I didn’t mention any names. Most of those have been redacted from the official reports for reasons of privacy. If he tries to find out who the student docent was, for example, he’s going to have to move heaven and earth to do it.”
“What did you make of his whole ‘this is personal for me, too’ gambit?”
She gave me a particularly searching look. “Is that what you thought it was? A gambit? That he pegged me and played the right cards to make me share my deepest feelings about my work?”
I blushed to the roots of my undisciplined hair. That was exactly what I’d thought.
“If he was playing some cynical angle, what good would knowing that I have skin in the game do him? I think he was sincere. He really does hate people sucking up his national heritage and selling it on the black market. But maybe I also think there’s more to the man than meets the eye.” She winked at me, put down her empty glass, and said, “Let’s go shopping, Tink. I feel like spending money, and there’s a little gallery down on the wharf that has the neatest knickknacks.”
The relief in her face—in her whole being—was palpable. She always liked to shop when she felt life was good. Me, I preferred to bomb down the coastal highway on my Harley—which is also what I preferred to do when I felt life was crappy. Right now, Rose seemed to be feeling very good indeed, and I was a complete jerk for wanting to rain on her shopping spree.
“So, you buy his story? It didn’t strike you as odd that he seemed to keep having to remind himself that he was researching a magazine article?”
“Good grief, Tink, what did I just say? The man is who he claims to be. And maybe more than he claims to be. I suspect his reasons for what he’s doing may be purely personal, and not professional at all.”
“But the way he was squeezing for information about the Hochob case—”
“Oh, come on—have you ever known a journalist who doesn’t try to squeeze ‘secrets’ out of his sources? That’s what interviewing is all about. He handled it exactly the way I would have done. Beezus, Gina, you’re a PI, you’d have handled it that way.”
I had to admit, she had a point. “I’m just not sure I believe the ‘day-in-the-life’ excuse he turned up for following you.”
“What—you think he’s an evil agent of the Sommers board of directors? They know the answers to everything he asked. They paid their legal firm very well to keep them informed, I’m sure.”
“What if he’s involved in the Heard case in some way? What if he was asking all those questions about how Sommers got busted because he wants to avoid making the same mistakes?”
At last, she blinked. “Okay . . . all right . . . you have a point. But if that’s the case, he’s tipped his hand, right? He’s done his ‘interview’ and now he’s gone, and I gave him very little information to work with that he couldn’t dig up some other way. If he’s in cahoots with Sommers or the museum or the people that looted Heard, his cover is blown. And you can bet we’ll be looking at Sommers under a microscope until the Heard artifacts turn up.” She looked at me speculatively for a moment. “Do you seriously distrust him? You think he’s got the Evil Eye or whatever your mom calls it?”
I took a deep breath and considered that, fondling the Caddie-wire obereg. “Kosoi sglaz. No actually, I don’t get any bad vibes from him at all. He’s a little arrogant, maybe. Annoyingly personable.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “But you’d like to think he’s got the kosoi sglaz—is that it? Why? Because he’s good-looking and male?”
I opened my mouth to protest but, dammit, she was not too far from the truth.
“C’mon, Tink. Let go of it. It’s been three years.”
“It’s hard to bounce back from something like that, Rose,” I told her. “It wasn’t just poor, pitiful me and my busted-up little heart. If it was just that, I swear I’d be over it by now.”
She glanced down at the worn wooden tabletop. “I know. But not every man is Jeremy Augustine. A lot more men are like your
dad, or my Dave, or Alvie.”
“You know, I try to believe that,” I said. “I really do. But every time I meet a new guy, all I can think about is Jeremy. I think about what that trust almost cost me.” I polished off my smoothie and stood up. “All this morbid talk is making my palms itch. Let’s go shopping.”
Chapter 4
A Real Case of the Yips
Are you sure you’re a detective?” The woman asked me. Her eyes made yet another skeptical assessment of my person. Up and down and up again, her gaze coming back to fix on my face.
I pointed at my license, which hung behind me on the wall of my third floor office, conveniently located above a bail bond office off Market on Hayes. “I’m pretty sure. And the state of California is pretty sure too.”
She was still skeptical, still standing just inside the office door. “You look more like a detective’s secretary.”
I held my tongue in check without too much difficulty. I was used to this. “Mrs. Meriweather, I assure you, I am a duly licensed private investigator with all the trimmings. I have a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, a black belt in kung fu, a nice little handgun, and a wonderful relationship with the local police.”
That was mostly true, though my ex–commanding officer, Ramon Mirande, still held a bit of a grudge over my leaving the force. He’d been my dad’s partner back in the day, and I was pretty sure he thought I was a wimp for not hanging in there after Dad was injured.
She sat down, finally, in one of the chairs facing my desk. “I thought private detectives always had trouble with cops,” my would-be client said suspiciously.
“Only on TV,” I lied. Truth was, some PIs had very bad relationships with the cops because they insisted on getting in the way or withholding evidence or doing something equally stupid when involved in a criminal case. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“Well . . .”
She pulled her oversized purse up onto her lap and half-opened the front zipper pocket as if she had not quite made up her mind to show me something.
My incoming phone line began flashing silently at that moment—a ringing phone can royally screw up an interview. She saw the flashing light as competition and reacted by pulling a photo out of her purse and shoving it across the desk at me.
I decided to let voice mail pick up and studied the photo. It showed a man and a dog apparently jogging down a beach. Moving in the opposite direction was a young woman in a crop top, bike pants, and headphones—also jogging. The two seemed to be waving at each other.
“Your husband?” I surmised.
She perked up, obviously impressed even though it was the most elementary of deductions. “And our dog, Hoover. Not for Herbert Hoover. Because he likes to clean up the floor when anybody spills.”
I put down the photograph, folded my hands, and regarded her questioningly, waiting for her to tell me that the husband or the dog or both were missing.
Instead, she pointed at the woman. “I want to know who she is.”
“May I ask why?”
“I think my husband is having an affair with her.”
I pulled a notepad out of my desk drawer and began to scribble. “And what makes you think this, Mrs. Meriweather?”
“Well, just look at them. They’re waving at each other.”
I stopped writing and looked up at her. “Mrs. Meriweather, I jog every morning and I wave at just about everybody I pass. We’re complete strangers, except for the fact that we see each other jogging every day.”
“But she’s . . . look at the way she’s looking at him.”
She was smiling. It was a pleasant smile. It made her look about seventeen.
My incoming line flashed again. This time I considered picking up. “Do you mind if I—?” I gestured toward the phone.
“I most certainly do.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
I studied the photo again, trying to see it the way this woman would. Her husband—a physically fit, nice-looking middle-aged man—greeting a very young, very cute (did I mention, young?) woman on a morning run.
“She’s wearing an engagement ring,” I noted.
Mrs. Meriweather flushed deeply. “You think Jack might have bought it for her?”
Well, that was one interpretation. “Not at all. I just meant it looks as if she’s romantically involved elsewhere. Did you take this picture?”
“No. Oh, no! I found it in our mailbox. Last Thursday.”
“Someone anonymously left you a photo of your husband waving at this girl? Any idea who?”
“I assumed it was a friend or a neighbor. Someone who wanted me to . . . be aware of what was going on.”
“So you’ve never seen your husband with this girl yourself.”
“Yes I have, actually. Well, I mean, I’ve followed him to the beach and seen them . . . wave. Several times,” she added.
“And can you describe what else happened on these occasions?”
“Well . . . nothing. They pass each other in approximately the same spot along Belvedere every morning—that I’ve observed—and they always wave.”
“Do they speak?”
“Sometimes they say, ‘good morning.’”
“But they never stop and talk?”
“Not that I’ve observed.” She was looking distinctly uncertain at this point, and not without reason.
I jotted down a few notes. “Tell me, Mrs. Meriweather, has your husband—Jack—ever given you any reason to suppose that he’s having an affair?”
“Not before this, no.”
“Has something changed in your marriage? Does he go missing at odd times? Is he less attentive? More distant? Not romantically interested in you?”
She colored again, her face going a rather becoming shade of pink. She was really quite pretty, and you needn’t qualify it by adding “for a woman her age.” Red-gold hair, very blue eyes.
“No, as a matter of fact, he’s . . . very attentive. And romantic. And he never ‘goes missing,’ as you put it.”
“Then what . . . ?” I shook my head and shrugged.
“Well, that’s not normal for a man his age, is it? I mean, he’s fifty-six years old. He’s supposed to be looking around, isn’t he? That’s what I’ve read. It’s what everyone says. My best friend thinks I’m a hopeless ninny because I refused to believe Jack is . . . fooling around. I thought maybe she was the one who left me the photo—so I’d consider what she said.”
“Then was the photo the only thing that changed your mind? Or did Jack do something?”
“No. But everybody knows about midlife crisis,” she told me earnestly, almost pleadingly. “It’s . . . it’s common wisdom. Isn’t it?”
Ah. Case closed. “Common wisdom” and the media strike again.
“Mrs. Meriweather, not all men your husband’s age go through second puberty or midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call it. My father never has. The fact is, not all men are alike. And it sounds as if Jack may be a real prize. Besides, I think he’d have to have a screw loose to fool around on someone as attractive as you.”
Listen to me. Defending man-kind. Wouldn’t Rose get a guffaw out of that?
The phone was flashing again. Probably a real case slipping away.
“Really?” said Mrs. Meriweather. “You think I’m overreacting?”
“Yeah, I do. And you’re probably right about your ‘best friend’ being the one who took the picture. Look, I could take your ‘case’ and follow your husband around and charge you for it. But it wouldn’t be ethical for me to take your money when I don’t honestly believe there’s a case. I think these two people just wave at each other.”
She looked at me with relief. “You’re probably right. I was letting my friend’s voice get into my head. I feel ridiculous.”
My incoming light had started flashing yet again. I never get that many calls in so short a time span. It had been nearly a week since cornering Cruz Veras, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t still waiting for a
shoe to fall . . . or an axe, as the case may be. I started to have a bad feeling about this.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Meriweather, I completely understand your concern, but I feel one hundred percent confident that you needn’t worry anymore.” I watched the flashing light out of the corner of my eye.
“Thank you so much for your time, I’m sorry to have wasted it with my silly worrying.”
She moved to put on her coat as I reached for the phone. It stopped ringing just as I got the handset to my ear.
Nuts.
I put it down again, and smiled at my new ex-client as she got herself ready to walk out the door.
“Thank you, Ms. Miyoko.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Meriweather.”
When she’d gone, I played back my last batch of messages. They were all from Rose and all were variations on a theme: “Gina, something’s happened. Call me.” When I dug my cell phone out of my fanny pack—realizing with a sting of guilt that I'd turned the ringtones off—I saw that there were texts to match.
“I’m still being followed.” Those were the first words out of Rose’s mouth when I reached her on her cell phone.
“Our reporter-archaeologist friend?”
“If it is, he’s changed cars. This one is a metallic green Chrysler LeBaron.”
I felt a shiver run through me at the mention of LeBarons. My last encounter with one did not conjure pleasant associations, mostly because I’d found a body in the trunk. I reflexively reached for my lucky Caddie wire, which was sticking jauntily out of my pencil cup. “Well, like you said—his cover was blown, so I suppose he might have changed vehicles. When did you notice this?”
“This morning, when I drove to the courthouse for the pretrial deposition with the Blankenships’ defense team. Listen, Tink, this guy—whoever he is—is a little more aggressive than our professor. I mean, maybe it is him, but . . .”
“What do you mean ‘more aggressive’?”
“I mean, pacing me in the left lane, pulling up, then dropping back, tailgating. Weird stuff.”
More shivers. “Close enough to get a look at?”
The Antiquities Hunter Page 5
