“No, of course not. I understand. Now, what was it you wanted to check?”
I explained about the pistol Tom Bradshaw had taken home.
“Well, that doesn’t ring a bell. Let’s look.”
He led me through a door behind the secretary’s desk to an office with lime green walls and old-fashioned, heavy maple furnishings. Cabinets with shelves behind glass doors on top and drawers on the bottom lined three of the four walls. Wheatley trekked over to one of them. Bending slightly, he pulled open a long, wide drawer. He fussed out the top page of what looked like an inch-thick tranche of oversized, accordion-folded computer printout. I’m talking about the kind of printout you get from a main frame, not a desktop. It seemed anomalous, somehow, like an Amish mom pulling a functional light saber from her apron.
Apparently quite pleased with himself, he gestured me over to examine the printout with him. I followed the tip of his index finger as it traced down one line-item after another, finally stopping on the third line of the second page. I pushed my head closer to read the entry:
Elliot Light Dragoon Pistol, 1 ea., cherry stock w/silver inlay, steel lock (w/o spr), steel barrel w/bluing, cherry case w/fitted velvet interior, c. 1761 (?). 0099676148.
A handwritten note to the left of the entry read, “Temp. w/drawn 10/12/10 TB.”
“Oh dear,” Wheatley said.
“What is it?”
“This notation says that Tom took the pistol out last October, but there’s no entry saying that he returned it. Come with me, please.”
Leading me through a door in the rear corner, behind his desk, he navigated through a warren of narrow hallways and corridors. We stepped out into a cool, dark room, where we startled a couple of people admiring the Battle of Lexington diorama. He led me brusquely onto the stage where bored middle-schoolers had found Tom Bradshaw’s body just before Thanksgiving. He walked right up to a wax British officer with his pistol leveled at the menacing wax rebels. I followed him. Someone else in the room gasped.
After a few seconds of careful examination, he beamed with relief and, I think, pure joy.
“No question about it. That’s no replica. That’s a real Elliot. Our only one.”
I caught my breath as I took a close look at the thing. Learned was right. It was magnificent, its nine-inch barrel resting in a stock that fit perfectly, its hammer coiled over on the flash-plate, begging to be cocked. The silver inlay in the stock winked at us. Some craftsman had given weeks of his life to creating this weapon, which wasn’t for hunting, or plinking, or target shooting. The only thing it was good for was to kill another human being. I imagined the gunsmith laboring day after day, casting the parts, carving the stock and the grip, filing the spring, and then, one day, stepping back to gaze with deep pleasure on his handiwork, perhaps saying a prayer to thank God for giving him the skill to make something this beautiful.
Did he think about the widows and orphans his splendid pistol would make? Or did he tell himself, “Soldiers will fight and rich fools will duel over trifles if they choose, and nothing I can do will stop them. If they don’t buy their pistols from me they’ll buy them from someone else, and my children will go hungry”? Or did he think about it at all?
“Well,” Wheatley said, “it’s here after all. Thank God for that.”
“Is it functional?”
“Oh, no. That little notation on the printout, ‘w-slash-o s-p-r,’ means that the lock doesn’t have a spring. The only way you could damage a man with this would be to club him over the head with it.”
“And there’s no way to tell when it was returned?”
“No, unfortunately. Only that it was before Tom died, obviously.”
Oh really?
“Thank you for helping me clear up this detail, Dr. Wheatley.”
“‘Colin,’ please. Yes, yes, you’re quite welcome.”
We shook hands and exchanged casual goodbyes.
“They shouldn’t have made you pay to get in,” he said then, apparently noticing my visitor patch for the first time. “I’ll call the front desk and tell them to give you a refund.”
“That’s all right. It’s late in the day. As long as I’m here, I think I’ll admire the display for awhile.”
He beamed again, let me help him down from the stage, then gave me a courtly nod and ambled away. On my way to the office I’d made special note of the blue-shirted guards, who looked fat, bored, and sleepy, and the surveillance cameras that reminded me of Betamax antiques. I was feeling pretty cocky about bringing off what I had in mind.
I wandered to the back of the room, inconspicuous in semi-darkness about thirty feet from the stage. When the other visitors left and I had the room to myself I sat down cross-legged on the floor and waited.
I didn’t have to wait all that long. At first I jumped a little at the random sounds of eleventh-hour visitors who wandered in for a last look at the diorama, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Then came the announcements that the museum was closing in fifteen minutes, then ten, then five, and all visitors should please leave. I stayed where I was. I assume a guard made a last round through the room—I heard unhurried steps after the lights went out—but he or she wasn’t ambitious enough to spot me.
I got a little tense as time went by after that and nothing happened. I imagined how dumb I’d feel if it turned out my theory was wrong and I ended up having to make up a story about falling asleep in here and getting locked inside. Then I heard someone coming into the room and trying to be quiet about it. I instantly came alert. He walked toward the diorama and stepped onto the platform.
I counted slowly to ten. Then, in no particular hurry, I stood up and walked toward him as he worked the flintlock out of the wax officer’s hand.
“Hi, Paul,” I said.
Chapter Forty-five
“Cindy!” Paul hissed my name in a stage whisper, like a parent reprimanding his child in church. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m not purloining antique firearms, am I?”
Striding forward as if I had some idea of what to do next, I stepped up onto the diorama stage. Paul just watched me come, not moving a muscle. This was the first time I’d laid eyes on him since the epic Battle of Learned’s Suite. Yeah, there was a poing! all right—but its resonance had a bad side as well as a good one. Sure, the SOB could have made a living modeling men’s briefs and posing for cologne ads. Some memories sparked a flare-up in my gut. But all the hatred came flooding back too. I remembered waking up feeling desolate inside, as if my soul were stuck in some perpetual winter twilight. I remembered eating food without tasting it. I remembered filling night after night with mind-numbing work so I wouldn’t have to think or feel.
Paul apparently wasn’t having this cuts-both-ways problem. His face lit up.
“How are you doing, Cindy?”
“I’m gnawed by existential doubt and seared by the tragic nature of the human condition, but aside from that I’m doing just fine, Paul. How are you doing?”
“Still little Miss Hardass.” He gave me that melt-in-your-mouth smile of his.
“Were you planning on telling me about stealing the gun when we met at eight tonight?”
“I’m not stealing it. This is the murder weapon, Cindy. This gun that’s been right under everybody’s nose all the time. I’m just verifying that.”
“Right. You’re probably one of only seven adults in the country who know less about firearms than I do and you’re going to do an expert analysis on this pistol.”
“Walt is innocent.” Paul transfixed me with the earnest expression of a middle-schooler talking about saving the rain forests. “They’re framing him. What they did was, they—”
“Shot Bradshaw with a smooth-bore pistol using a spent bullet from Learned’s forty-five,” I snapped. “I field-tested that theory
seven hours ago. But who’s ‘they’?”
“Wendy Sommers. She’s working for the gang that has the Gardner Museum stuff. They thought Bradshaw and Walter were working together to help the Feds get them. So they killed Bradshaw and they’re framing Walt for his murder. Two birds with one stone. It’s brilliant.”
“How did Sommers get her hands on Learned’s gun?” In the excitement I forgot about tact. I shot questions at him as if he were on a witness stand. “How did she get in here while the museum was closed? How did she even know that Bradshaw would be in the museum, when the only reason he was here was that he wanted to chill someplace while he got himself psychologically ready to face the state police? How did she get close enough to him to shoot him with a weapon that’s not accurate from much more than twelve feet?”
That wouldn’t have been a bad closing argument. Unfortunately, Paul wasn’t a jury of anyone’s peers. He scowled, with a pitying expression on his face.
“You don’t know Walt like I do. He couldn’t have killed Bradshaw. He and Bradshaw were friends in a way that only certain kinds of men can be. You couldn’t understand it.”
“Paul, Bradshaw was killed by someone he knew and trusted. He let the killer into this museum himself. His body wasn’t moved after death, so he must have let the killer come with him onto this display. That gun you’re holding is one of the most valuable pieces the museum owns. There must be some kind of alarm that he could have tripped if he’d suspected anything. Up to the last second of his life he couldn’t have imagined that he was in any danger.”
Paul opened his mouth. I’ll always wonder what would have come out if he’d spoken. The next thing that happened, though, wasn’t Paul saying something. The next thing that happened was Cindy almost wetting her pants for the first time since the age of three.
A minuteman stepped out of the waxy crowd on this faux Lexington Common and walked stiffly toward us. He was carrying a musket in his right hand. I jumped at least a foot. Paul outdid me. He not only jumped, he dropped the bloody pistol. Only pure instinct and quick reflexes let me catch the two-hundred-fifty-year-old piece of custom-crafted artillery before it crashed to the stage.
“Walt!” he yelped. “You’re supposed to be in Switzerland!”
Yep, the minuteman was Walter Learned, in heavy makeup and costume, but recognizable. He had to have been standing there that whole time, like some busker posing as a statue in a public square so that tourists will throw coins in his box.
“Hush.” Learned spoke gently and offered Paul an encouraging smile. “I don’t think Ms. Jakubek would snitch on you, but popping off with guilty knowledge is a bad habit.”
“But you’re in danger! You said—”
“Yes, I’m in danger, and the sooner I get out of here the better. So just listen. We don’t have much time.”
Learned turned toward me.
He heard every word I said, I thought. He knows that I know everything. I am going to die. I am going to end my life holding this childish, dumbass relic of an eighteenth-century pistol in my hands.
“Tom had decided to kill me,” Learned said to me.
“Because of Ariane?”
“It’s more complicated than that. Tom and I took a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. It was just a now-and-then thing with Ariane anyway. I hadn’t been with her for years when circumstances sort of threw us together a few months ago. Anyway, Tom didn’t have any standing to chastise Ariane for stepping out with me.”
“Because he’d been cheating on her with you for years?”
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.” Learned sighed. “But don’t get judgmental when I’m trying to give you information you want. What put me in Tom’s crosshairs was Caitlin.”
“You mean finding out that you were her father.”
“Yes. That shattered his soul. He had no idea Ariane and I had gone back that long. The Feds were pressuring him. The state police were crawling up his rectum over some penny-ante tax thing. His patrimony was evaporating. All of that put him under inhuman stress. I should have been a better friend. I should have focused on that. But I didn’t. When he found out about Caitlin, he snapped. He brought that gun home, replaced the spring, oiled it, and made sure the hammer and lock were in good working order.”
“And then you turned the tables on him.”
“If that’s a conclusion, it’s hasty, and if it’s a question, it’s pointless. You’re going to believe I killed him regardless of what I say.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” Paul hoarsely insisted. “You didn’t kill anyone!”
“Never mind.” Learned turned toward Paul. “She believes what she said. The police will believe it. Everyone except you will believe it. And there’s no way to disprove it.”
He kept on talking to Paul in a soothing voice, but I only caught the gist. I was feeling the coldest gut-chill I can ever remember. The look in his eyes when he spoke to me made me shudder. The last time I’d seen that look I was twelve years old, beside the bed where Vince’s mom had been lying for two months. I hadn’t realized what it meant until the next morning: it meant she knew she was going to die.
I’m three feet from a murderer. I’m standing three yards from where Tom Bradshaw was when that same soothing voice took him off his guard—fatally.
“The best way you can help me,” Learned was saying to Paul, “is to forget about mock heroics. Sit tight here for half-an-hour. Then, get out and go to ground in Philadelphia.”
As unobtrusively as I could manage, I fished the packet of black powder out of my jacket pocket. I didn’t have any ammo for the pistol, but I figured I’d take it one step at a time. I tilted the gun’s muzzle up as much as I dared, and poured the powder down the barrel. I probably didn’t need to bother being sneaky about it. Learned had eyes for no one but Paul. I put a dab of powder on the flash-plate
“Do you understand, Paul?” Learned was saying.
Maybe he’s just going to club me over the head with that musket. Okay, maybe if I just fired the gun, the blast and flash would shock him long enough for me to run.
Learned started to turn. I used the heel of my left hand to rack back the hammer.
“Later,” he said to me, over his shoulder. “Good luck in New York.”
Then, in three creaky strides he was off the stage and headed for the door.
“What’s happening?” Paul swerved around to look at the doorway as Learned went through it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just shut up and do what he told you.”
“But he’s leaving!”
“Look, Paul, I know you’re strung out. Just get a grip on it, okay? Two things I’m sure of are that Learned cares about you and he’s smarter than you are. So stay here like he said. Whatever chance he has, it probably drops to zero if you go running after him.”
Logic is no match for passion. “Like hell!”
Paul leaped at one of the redcoats to relieve him of the bayonet on his musket. He cussed and strained at the fitting where the bayonet joined the barrel. He was determined to gallop into a gunfight with cold steel, like El Cid in a time warp. I knew that, one way or another, he’d get the thing off before the night was a minute older.
“Paul, there are probably cops out there after him right now!”
“They’ll be dead cops soon if they are.”
I suppose I could have run over and tugged on his arm or something while I tried to yell some sense into him, but he would just have knocked me into the middle of next week with one paw. I dug into my pocket for the ring. Maybe that could grab his attention long enough to keep him from committing suicide. Holding the gun awkwardly in my left hand, I got the ring out.
“Look at this! Please look at it!”
He swiveled his head toward me. His eyes widened. I think it might actually have worked i
f I’d had another thirty seconds.
But I didn’t. A strident clanging like an old-fashioned school fire alarm split the air. Lights suddenly came on. Paul went back to work on the bayonet, now with manic energy. I saw someone in a guard’s uniform sprint past the doorway. Not slow, not fat, not sleepy, and holding a weapon that definitely wasn’t a flintlock pistol. He glanced into the room on the way past. Couldn’t possibly have missed us, and we were fiddling with the museum’s crown jewel. But the guard kept right on running—clearly after something else.
I didn’t waste any more words. I’d just gotten an idea and I didn’t want to give myself time to think about it. I dropped the ring down the barrel of the gun. I pulled the ramrod out and pushed it down the barrel until the ring felt like it was seated tightly against the powder.
Paul yanked the bayonet off and jumped in one fluid motion to the floor.
Even over the clanging alarm I heard a burst of shots, way too fast for anything but a fully automatic gun.
I pulled the hammer back to full cock. Paul was halfway to the door by now. I took the monster pistol in both hands, extended my arms full length, and did my best to aim. Paul was one good stride from the doorway when I squeezed the trigger. The roar deafened me and my arms shot up from the kick. Backflash burned both of my hands and grains of half-burned powder buried themselves in my thumbs. All I could see was purple smoke. For a second, I didn’t have any idea whether I’d hit him.
Then his piercing scream let me know.
“Jesus Christ, Cindy, What have you done? Aaagghhh!”
I peered through the smoke. Paul was lying on his right side, screaming while he felt behind him with his left hand.
I aimed for his left thigh. I swear I aimed for the back of his left thigh. But it’s a smooth-bore weapon and yada-yada-yada. I’d shot him right in the ass.
Chapter Forty-six
I laid the pistol down and sprinted over to Paul, pulling out my Droid on the way. Before I was halfway there, I heard five distinct shots—Bang! Bang!…Bang! Bang! Bang! I heard splintering glass, but no human screams. I hoped this meant that cops had arrived and were shooting at the rogue guard with the machine gun, because otherwise I figured Paul and I had no more chance than perch at a fish fry.
But Remember Their Names Page 26
