Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) (19 page)

Although Meg had seen Minetti directing the Crime Scene crew in her garage, and he must have seen her, he had introduced himself to her with some formality. He also introduced a slim young Chinese American who wore sweats beneath the protective coverall. Fong had round metal-rimmed glasses. He smiled at her. Minetti was less welcoming but minded his manners.

They had left her almost at once and gone off about their own business. A vacuum cleaner whirred and stopped. Every once in awhile, a cell phone would ring and she would hear a low male voice. Otherwise the house was silent. It smelled of dog and could have done with a good dusting.

Meg took a little tour. The decor was retro without being fashionable, as if the Brandstetters had inherited the furnishings and never changed them. A depressing oil painting of a sherbet pink mountain hung in the living room. The sofa was brown plush with a matching armchair. A huge white leather recliner, not of the period, sat in front of the big-screen television with VCR and DVD players docked beneath it. She saw no evidence of interest in music, no CDs or tapes. The carpet was beige shag
avec
dog hair.

In the dining room, a dim color print of dead birds and a shotgun hung over the sideboard. The table and chairs looked as if they hadn’t been used in years. Perhaps they hadn’t. The chrome-legged breakfast table in the kitchen showed signs of heavy use. She gathered that the Brandstetters did not entertain.

There were no family pictures in sight, but dozens of photographs showed Hal’s truculent red face next to one politician or another. These photo ops had been carefully framed, then hung without much sense of spacing, too low or too high, in the hall, the dining room, and the living room.

The housekeeping was just good enough not to be slatternly. Tammy Brandstetter must have vacuumed and dusted once a month, and at a guess, cleaned out the clutter once a week. She had left no mark of personality on the public rooms of the house. Nothing showed her interests apart from the dog, a large exception in every sense.

Towser was a presence: dog scent, dog hair, a well-chewed rawhide toy on the living room carpet, scratch marks on the doors, dog dishes in the sink. Meg wondered if Hal had been afraid of Towser, and if so, why he had tolerated the ridgeback. Perhaps Hal had been afraid to be afraid.

She was sorting the printouts by subject matter and website, a no-brainer, so she let her mind wander as her hands worked. If, as seemed probable, Hal had been in on the Lauder Point theft, he had not stolen the artifacts because he found them interesting for their own sake. Neither he nor his wife collected art. But somebody did.

What kind of person collected things? Until she inherited the Brentwood house, Meg had never had the means to acquire a collection, and she doubted that she had the temperament, either. She would not have collected books—too much like work.

She enjoyed reading, and she knew enough to admire a well-designed, well-bound volume, but book collectors’ obsession wasn’t reading. She had known collectors with mint-crisp first editions who bought cheap paperback versions of their treasures if they wanted to read them.

To amass a true book collection you needed reasons other than love of the written word. Some book collectors were motivated by greed. If they were shrewd and knowledgeable, they could make good money on first editions of writers like Stephen King. Others wanted to impress. On her one trip abroad, Meg had visited the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, a dazzling personal collection of medieval manuscripts. It said a lot about Beatty’s taste and expertise as well as his wealth. Impressive.

Some collectors were scholars who wanted to lay their hands on everything ever published about Dutch sailing vessels or Civil War weapons, or whatever. Some were antiquarians with no interest in anything published after a given date. Some were just accumulators. They liked books, and the books piled up, but they never culled them. Meg was fond of accumulators, but she wouldn’t have wanted to live with the book dust at home
and
at work. A by-product of decaying glue and paper, it is obnoxious enough to be classified as an allergen.

She was sorting with a will. Halfway through, she came across a bibliography, a thick printout of sources that dealt with the looting of archaeological sites. It focused on the impact of looting on scholarship and on the victimized cultures. One of the articles listed was called “Killing the Past,” a crisp summary of the consequences.

Meg had not only visited the Beatty collection in Dublin, on the same trip she had also made a pilgrimage to the British Museum. At that time, the book collection was still housed in the huge museum in Great Russell Street. She had viewed the Lindisfarne Gospel and the Gutenberg Bible with suitable awe. Then, with an hour to kill, she had strolled through the wing housing the Elgin Marbles.

Early in the nineteenth century, Lord Elgin had sailed to Athens, hired local workmen, and crated up all the Periclean sculpture he could find on the Acropolis. He had sailed back to London with his booty, and the swag had later been given to the British Museum. It remained a bone of contention between the British and the Greeks.

True, the works he appropriated had been lying unvalued in the dirt when Elgin removed them. True, air pollution in present-day Athens was so appalling, the acids would probably destroy the art. Equally true, the works were Greek, not English, part of the heritage of Greece, and they belonged in Athens, the city that had offered them as a tribute to the goddess of wisdom. Both sides made other points, but that was the gist of the argument.

A mostly neutral observer, Meg had found the well-conceived display of the Elgin Marbles disorienting. In London, their meaning changed. The sculptures became not a tribute to Athena but the trophies of a nineteenth-century aristocrat. A Scot, as Lord Byron had pointed out in his scathing satire on the subject, not an Englishman. They were, however, displayed in London, not in Edinburgh.

And the moral of the story? Was Lord Elgin a looter? Were the modern equivalents of Lord Elgin, the great museums and galleries, looters, too? They spent unimaginable wealth on pots, masks, temple friezes, rock art. And low-life scum like Hal Brandstetter often brought them the goods.

And what about the archaeologists themselves, the scholars who studied pots and masks and rock drawings
in situ?
It seemed to Meg that, just by looking at the artifacts, they focused the minds of collectors and thieves on what they studied, so they became part of the mentality without wanting to.

Meg browsed through the titles listed in the bibliography on looting. She had a lot of experience with bibliographies, and this one was a winner—well organized, deep, clearly annotated, a pleasure to behold. Apparently, Hal had thought so, too. He had highlighted the articles that dealt with collectors of Native American artifacts.

Meg was getting a headache. She backed off a couple of steps and stared at the heaps of sorted paper. Collectors. What about them? Her Aunt Margaret, the one who left her the house, had collected thimbles. It was hard to imagine anyone killing in the course of thimble-theft.

“Time out for lunch?” Earl Minetti stood in the hall and eyed her work. “I want to lock up.”

“Good idea. Do you like chili?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I made a big pot overnight. It should be fairly tasty by this time, and the two of you are welcome to join me.” Meg was still into therapeutic cookery. “Three of you,” she added. “Jake’s out in the garage, isn’t he?”

Minetti nodded. He looked wary, as if he wondered why she was being so generous.

No such thing as a free lunch? Meg led the way to her kitchen. She would feed them there where it was comfortable. The dining table was heaped with boxes.

Jake made himself at home while the other two had a look at the ground floor of the house and Meg dished up.

“Hey, Meg, you’re a cop,” he said, grinning.

She smiled back. “Not really. I’m a consulting expert. Sounds more expensive.”

He laughed. “Something I can do?”

“Put out the silverware and glasses.” She cut bread, glad she’d had the wit to thaw another loaf that morning.

He fumbled in her flatware drawer and came up with the right cutlery.

“How’s Todd?”

He made a face. “Torn in two. His mom and Maddie Thomas keep calling him, wanting to know what’s happening, and he can’t tell them. Not that there’s anything to tell. I wish they’d lay off.” He plunked down knives and big spoons all around. Who needed forks?

“The young man who was killed—”

“Todd’s cousin, Eddy. Todd’s sick about that. I guess I would be, too. I hope we stick it to the bastard who killed him.” He rummaged in the cupboard, found glasses, and set one at each place.

“You don’t think it was Brandstetter?”

He eyed her with the same wariness she had seen in Minetti, and for that matter, in Rob Neill.

“Never mind, Jake. I have my own ideas, but they’re just ideas. You guys will sort it out eventually. Why don’t you go round up the other two?” She started ladling chili into the big soup bowls she had bought when Lucy started bringing home boyfriends.

The chili passed muster if the silence that fell as the men ate was an indication. Meg thought it tasted okay, though she probably should have chopped another
poblano
into it. It was chili definitely
con came
. Somewhere she had a nice recipe for vegetarian chili. To a man, the deputies drank milk. Meg was not a great drinker of milk herself and had been nipping at a half gallon since her first shopping expedition. Gone in one fell gulp.

A cell phone rang. Minetti wiped his trim little mustache with a paper napkin and said, “Minetti, yeah. At Ms. McLean’s eating lunch. What?”

Meg wagged the ladle at Jeff. “More?”

He held out his bowl. “I haven’t tasted chili that good since I left California. The folks up here don’t have a clue.”

“My God, they did what?”

Everybody looked at Minetti. He had turned pale. “Right away, Jane. Ten-four.” He set the phone down. “Somebody in a green pickup just shot Rob Neill.”

Men shouted. The ladle clattered in the tureen. Meg couldn’t get her breath.

At last she heard Minetti saying, “The ambulance is on its way. Jeff, you keep on with the house. Jake, we need the patrol car. We’re looking for an older Datsun pickup with Washington plates. Green, she said.”

Jake was on his feet. “He saw the shooter?”

Minetti shoved his chair back and stood, too. “I guess so. Some old lady was talking with Rob when it happened. I think she was hit, too.”

Jeff said, “Just a fucking minute, Earl—”

Minetti turned. “No. Somebody has to keep after Brandstetter’s killer. You can finish the house. You know what to do. I’ll call you when I get better information.”

Jeff’s mouth set but he nodded. “House key?”

Minetti dug in his jacket pocket and threw the key to Jeff. “We’re out of here. Thanks, Meg.”

“Yeah,” the other two chorused. “Thanks.”

Meg got up in a daze and turned the burner off under the pot of chili. Jeff trailed the others, disconsolate.

“Hold on,” she blurted. “I’m coming with you.”

“But I don’t—”

“It’s perfectly all right,” she said firmly. “I need to finish sorting the printouts and take some notes. You can supervise me.” And she walked out on the dirty dishes.

When she returned to the fusty Brandstetter dining room, though, Meg couldn’t remember what the piles of paper meant. Her hands shook.

Calm down, she told herself. There’s nothing you can do about Rob, so do what you can. You had an idea. She sat on one of the chairs, closed her eyes, and trembled. Jeff was banging around in the master bedroom.

She hoped Rob wasn’t badly injured or God forbid dead. It sounded as if he wasn’t dead. Yet.

Collectors, that was it. Something about collectors, their peculiar psychology. J. Paul Getty. When he left his enormous fortune to the museum bearing his name, curators around the world shook in their boots. The Getty Museum could outbid them all. The core and genesis of the Getty was the old man’s personal collection.

Personal collection, personal obsession. Rob, God willing, should be looking for a compulsive personality, a wealthy compulsive. Somebody with taste and intensity.

That might do as a general observation. What about specifics? The collector wanted not books nor Greek statues but Indian artifacts, probably just from the Gorge. The Lauder Point collection had not been famous. Someone had had to know enough about it to value it. That was too mild. To lust after it, and, once he possessed it, to keep it so well hidden that no word of its whereabouts leaked out.

He
. She had used the masculine pronoun. Why not she? Carol Tichnor? Her mother? From what Helmi Wirkkala had said, Charlotte Tichnor fit the profile better than her daughter. Meg began to imagine a scenario in which the lady spun a web of chicanery from Seattle, using as agents her father’s neighbors and her own children, especially her daughter, whom she could bully. Charlotte’s web.

I’m a pushover for literary allusions, Meg reflected, and with a lurch of nausea, I wish I could bounce that one off Rob’s head. She gritted her teeth and forced her mind back into the frame of logic.

Charlotte had been something of a figure in Seattle society. The logical course was to search the archives of the
Seattle Times
. Brandstetter’s computer. Meg had jumped to her feet and was halfway to the office before it occurred to her that she shouldn’t mess with Hal’s computer.

She drifted back and picked up the blank notebook she had brought and not yet used. Time to plod. She ripped off the annoying latex gloves, took out her pen, jotted “Seattle papers/Charlotte,” and then began to write up what she had done and why. It took awhile. Listing the website addresses Hal had used was blessedly mind-numbing. Then there was the question of collectors.

“Coffee?”

Meg jumped. “You startled me.”

“Sorry,” Jeff said. “I can’t concentrate. That doesn’t seem to be your problem.”

She took a good look at his face. “I could do with a latte.”