“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”
Anna Quindlen
Questioning the museum docents about the Manet seemed pointless in light of the fact that nothing with Madame Auguste was amiss, and they definitely didn’t want to talk about the heist. They all just seemed to answer with rehearsed phrases about focusing on all the amazing art still in the building, even though the empty frames on the walls practically begged for heist questions. I wanted to talk to Crystal, the lovely young MassArt student, but she wouldn’t be in until after two p.m., so I checked the portfolio into the museum coat check, then returned a call to my D&D friend Taylor’s contact at The Boston Globe. That was how Darius and I came to be seated across from a guy nicknamed Double D, whose byline was Dave DeAngelis, and who had been writing for The Globe since 1988.
We were at a small table in the back of a bar that could have been the set of any mob movie from any period of American history in the past hundred years. D, which is how he’d introduced himself, had a pint of some very dark beer in front of him. Darius had ordered a lager, and I had a glass of some Italian red wine that didn’t look like it would leave me with a purple tongue. We sat in the nearly empty bar listening to D lay out the timeline of the Gardner Museum heist.
“First, you should know that Isabella Stewart Gardner left an endowment for the museum when she died, the terms of which stipulated that nothing could be changed. The board of directors took that to heart and didn’t install the upgraded security that other museums were doing at the time. They also couldn’t afford to insure any of the artwork in the museum. Besides infrared motion detectors and four cameras outside around the perimeter of the building, the only security at night was provided by a twenty-three-year-old guard named Rick and a twenty-five-year-old guard named Randy who were paid just slightly more than minimum wage.”
D had a great voice, and I wondered if he had ever done any radio news. I didn’t think he’d done TV because he didn’t have that news anchor face. His face was more guy-in-a-dark-bar-talking-about-thieves. I looked over at Darius and was oddly pleased to realize he was as intrigued by D’s story as I was.
D took a big swallow of beer and gave us equal attention as he continued his tale. “The thieves – two men dressed in Boston P.D. uniforms – were witnessed by some St. Patrick’s Day drunks at about 12:30 a.m. parked in a hatchback about a hundred yards from the entrance to the museum. At 1:20 a.m., the thieves pulled up outside the side entrance, parked, walked to the door, and rang the buzzer, which connected them to Rick, the twenty-three-year-old guard. Rick let them into the side entrance where he was told to call Randy down from his rounds. When Randy arrived, both guards were restrained with handcuffs, at which time the thieves indicated they were there to rob the place. The guards were then marched down to the basement and cuffed to a steam pipe and work bench.”
“Were the guards investigated for collusion?” Darius asked.
“Absolutely. And it’s generally assumed that Rick’s movements during his shift just prior to the thieves’ arrival may have had something to do with preparation for the robbery. I’ve read a blog post with FBI photos that indict Rick as an accomplice, but no conclusive proof was ever found, and at the time the FBI believed the two guards were too incompetent to have pulled off the crime.”
“The motion detectors must have left a record of movements through the museum, correct?” Darius continued. He was listening as a security systems expert, and the reminder of our relative positions on the subject of art theft made me squirm a bit in my seat.
D nodded. “It took eleven minutes to subdue the guards, but the first movement in the Dutch Room wasn’t recorded until thirteen minutes after that. There, they smashed the glass on two Rembrandts, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black, by throwing them on the marble floor, then cut the canvases off their stretchers.”
If D noticed the look Darius shot me, it didn’t halt his story. I noticed it though, and the look sent a slithery feeling down through my stomach which subdued any butterfly that dared take flight at how close we sat to each other.
D continued. “Three minutes later, one of the thieves left the Dutch Room and went down the hall to the Short Gallery where he tried to steal the Napoleonic flag, but he couldn’t manage the screws, so he just took the finial from the top of the flagpole. The other thief joined him there, and they also took five Degas sketches from that room. From the Dutch Room they took Vermeer’s The Concert, Flinck’s Landscape with an Obelisk, a small Rembrandt self-portrait, and a Chinese vase. The final painting that was stolen, and the one most confounding, was a Manet from the Blue Room.”
The slithery feeling wound around my spine when Darius didn’t look at me and instead leaned forward intently. “Which Manet, and why was it confounding?”
D sat back and finished his beer in a long gulp. Darius raised his hand to the bartender for another and avoided my eyes as he focused his attention on the craggy-faced reporter in front of us.
“You’ve seen the small empty frame under the larger Manet in the Blue Room?” he asked us. We both nodded. “That used to hold a painting called Chez Tortoni. The entire painting, frame and all, was removed from the wall the night of the theft, but the frame was left on the museum director’s chair, and the motion detectors recorded no footsteps in the Blue Room while the thieves were in the museum.”
The bartender set another dark beer on the table in front of D, who raised it in a toast to both of us. “Eighty-one minutes the thieves spent in the Gardner Museum that night. Eighty-one minutes with no police, no security cameras, and no guards to interfere. The side door was finally opened at 2:40a.m. and again at 2:45a.m., after the thieves took time to remove the cassette tapes from the perimeter camera feeds and data printouts from the motion detectors.”
“The hard drives were still in place though, I assume?” Darius said.
“They were, which is how we have the timeline we have. The thieves also made a point to check on the guards to make sure they were comfortable before they left with thirteen stolen artworks.”
“No leads on who the thieves were or where the artwork ended up?” I asked. I didn’t look at Darius, but my foot accidentally brushed against his under the table, and I nearly jumped from the electric current that passed between us. I was acutely aware of his profession, his attractiveness, and his interest in the story D was telling us – all of which made him completely, dangerously compelling.
The veteran reporter shrugged, clearly blind to the tension that had been building between Darius and me. “There’s always Whitey Bulger to blame, especially now that he’s dead.”
I barked a laugh that seemed to startle both men. “Did you know that Whitey hated his nickname? He preferred to be called Jim – which is a terrible name for a mob boss-turned-FBI-informant, by the way. Also, he did three years in Alcatraz, but liked it so much there he went back as a tourist with his girlfriend. And when he was in prison in Alabama, he volunteered for the CIA’s MKUltra program to take time off his sentence. They injected him with LSD as part of a mind control experiment. He didn’t know that’s what they were doing – nobody did – and when he found out, he made plans to assassinate the guy in charge of the program.”
D leaned back in his chair and chuckled in appreciation. “I knew about Alcatraz and the nickname, but not about MKUltra. You a journalist?”
“No,” I said happily, giving myself a point for stumping the reporter, “I just don’t sleep much.”
D looked at Darius as if checking for confirmation, and I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or complimented by it. Darius had a strange look on his face, and his knee brushed against mine, zinging me with another electric shock.
“Well,” D said, still chuckling, “there were a lot of dead ends, a couple of mob connections, and a chop shop or two that were investigated. Consensus now seems to be that the heist was probably planned as a way to get insurance against prison time.”
“Insurance against prison time?” I asked.
D shrugged. “Mid-level mob doesn’t have the connections to move big money art. But they could use it to negotiate a deal when they got caught for stupid low-level stuff that carried stiff sentences.”
I looked at Darius, and his eyebrows had risen as high as mine had. “Just what Junior tried to do.”
D’s eyes narrowed. “You have something new on the heist?”
I shook my head. “I had a bounty offer me some info if I’d let him go.”
“You didn’t take it?” D practically gasped.
“I’m a bounty hunter, not the D.A. I don’t make deals with bail jumpers,” I said sharply. That earned me a speculative look from Darius and a frown from D.
“Well, if you ever do stumble on something solid about the Gardner heist, I’d appreciate a call. It’s one of the Holy Grail stories for Boston reporters.”
Darius stood, and when I started to get up, he pulled my chair back in a total Disney prince move. “We appreciate your time, Mr. DeAngelis, and if anything does come up, we’ll certainly call you,” he said.
I took out my card and wrote a name on the back of it. I handed it to D and said, “This is the name of my bail jumper. He’s worried about his mom because his sister has had some trouble. If you want a crack at Junior’s information, I’d suggest playing a compassion card with him. You might have some luck.”
D took the card with a grateful nod. “Thanks. I appreciate the tip.” Then he shook Darius’s hand and pulled a black-and-white photograph out of his coat pocket, which he handed to me. “Here’s one of the original crime scene photos of the Dutch Room. The New York Times reprinted it as part of a book review in 2015. It’s hard to find online without a direct link.”
I glanced at the photo, and my gaze slid right past the two frames and smashed glass on the floor to the open wall panel. “There’s a door on that wall?”
D settled back in his seat and lifted his beer to us in a toast. “There used to be.”
The docent in the Dutch Room was a friendly middle-aged woman named Amber, whose short, spiky hair was tipped in a deep red that matched a beautiful knit scarf she gathered closed with an Irish cloak pin.
I stopped to admire Amber’s pin in a tactical move to open a dialogue, while Darius strode across the room to examine the fabric-covered panel behind the empty frame that had held The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
“I’ve heard there was a door behind that panel,” I said to Amber, nodding to the place where Darius studied the wall.
“They turned it back into a window when they tore down the annex building,” she said with a helpful smile.
“The annex?” I asked.
“Where they used to do restoration and repair on the artwork. Now that’s all done in the new wing.” Amber said.
Darius turned to join the conversation. “The hinges of the wall panel are cleverly concealed behind the fabric,” he said to me.
“This door was only used when art pieces were moved in and out of the laboratory. The staff who worked in the annex used an outside entrance.”
I opened my mouth to follow up with a pointed question about the night of the heist, but Darius beat me to the next sentence, which he uttered with perfectly casual interest that actually impressed me with its sincerity.
“Have you worked here a long time then?” He flashed his perfect Disney prince smile, and I had to shush the instinct to smile back, or throw myself on him, because both were real.
Apparently Amber was similarly affected, at least in the returned smile department. “I started as an intern—” she looked around with all the subtlety of a bad spy and whispered, “the year before the heist.”
I saw the sharp glint of steel flash in his eyes as he upped the wattage on the princely smile. “You must know all the stories …”
I could practically see the ellipsis hanging in the air after his words, inviting her to finish the sentence with all the stories.
Amber’s smile faltered just a little bit as she leaned in closer to us to whisper. “We’re … discouraged from speaking about it. They actually give us a script to follow when people ask.”
I totally called it. I leaned forward too. “What if we don’t ask about that night at all? What if we just ask what it was like to work here that first year? I mean, you must have some great stories from that time. I know my mom does,” I lied, totally not knowing anything at all about my mom’s time working here. I was sure if I did the math, I could figure out when exactly that had been, but Darius’s expression of approval as he looked at me completely prevented any mathing.
“Oh! What’s her name? I might know her,” Amber said, all traces of nervousness gone from her voice. I shot Darius a quick glance and he gave a tiny nod.
“Sophia Kiriakis. She was a student at MassArt.”
Amber’s expression scrunched up like she was struggling to remember. “I feel like I know that name, but I’m not sure.”
“What about her sister, Alexandra? Alex Kiriakis.”
Amber’s eyes opened wide. “Alex? Yeah, I remember Alex. She went to all the parties.”
I stared at Darius, then quickly shifted my attention back to Amber. “There were parties here, in the museum?”
“Oh yeah, almost every weekend. When the new museum director – she’s gone now – when she didn’t move into the fourth floor like all the others had, a couple of the guards started having impromptu jam sessions with their band out in the courtyard. It was pretty great, actually.”
“It sounds like it. Kind of like the movie Night at the Museum, except without all the animals that come to life,” I said, picturing Rembrandt stepping out of his portrait to go chat with the Madonna next door.
Amber laughed. “Oh the animals definitely came to life back then. There was one boy, one of Ricky’s friends in the band, I think, who taught a couple of the others how to play sensor tag.”
Another docent entered the Dutch Room and waved Amber over. Her expression shuttered. “Damn,” she whispered under her breath. “It was nice talking to you both,” she said in a professional voice as she walked toward the man who’d entered the room.
I watched her greet him carefully, and then I tugged Darius’ hand. “Come on, we won’t get anything else from Amber today. She’s getting spanked for talking to us.”
Darius glanced at the man, and I knew he understood. I took us on a circuitous route around the room, playing the happy tourist for the security people. It wasn’t until we finally wandered out of the Dutch Room that I realized I still held his hand – or he held mine, I wasn’t sure.
It was nice. Way more than nice. It was also electric, zingy, zappy, and confusing as hell.
He must have realized it too, because he dropped my hand like it was a live wire.
“Sensor tag?” I said, to crowd out the other words that my instinct for self-preservation prevented me from saying. “Like trip a motion sensor, and tag, you’re it?” I took a step back from him so the current between us could diffuse.
“Exactly like that, I think.” He considered the room for a moment, his eyes taking in every camera, every motion sensor, every fire alarm and sprinkler. “Come,” he said finally, and walked down the corridor to the Short Gallery. Damn, he was sexy when he got all bossy and professional. I had to keep reminding myself that his profession was actually still diametrically opposed to my one and only foray into thieving, no matter how much fun this investigation of a thirty-year-old mystery might be. I also reluctantly reminded myself that the Gardner heist had nothing to do with Madame Auguste, and she was the whole reason I was at the museum in the first place.
But who was I kidding? Solving the old mystery was a game I could play that let me spend time with Darius without the risk that he’d have me arrested, and Darius seemed to prefer playing it too. So I followed him as we went in search of the next clue.
Once we were inside the small gallery, he studied the cabinets on either side of the room. “The pieces stolen from here were drawings from the cabinet and the finial from the top of the Napoleonic flag.”
I watched him move around the gallery, his natural grace making the khakis and casual sweater he wore look expensive. I could be wearing an evening gown next to him and he’d still look more elegant. He wasn’t especially tall – probably six feet or so – and his athleticism looked like it came from rowing or swimming rather than gym equipment. I thought I’d heard him say that his spirit animal was a jaguar. That felt right. He prowled the room with stealthy grace, and I found it ironic that he’d make a great thief.
Except I was the thief.
And even if thief wasn’t my usual job, I had the brain, eyeballs, and a few of the skills of one, so maybe it was time to put all that criminal potential to use.
“What was the timeline of the heist?” I murmured to him as I came to stand next to him in front of the cabinet where the missing Degas drawings had been kept.
“If DeAngelis’ information is correct, the sensors apparently logged quite a bit of back and forth activity between the Dutch Room and this one, but the Dutch Room had all the high-dollar-value paintings, and these were just sketches,” he said quietly. The docent that stood just inside the Little Salon could see into the Short Gallery, but he was paying attention to a young couple with a toddler who wanted to touch all the tapestries.
My shoulder just barely touched Darius’s arm as I studied the contents of the cabinet. “There’s a Michelangelo in there,” I said, pointing.
“And so many lovely little pocketable things, and yet they only took five drawings,” he said.
“They must have had a list,” I finally said. “Given to them by whoever planned the job. And if anything else went missing, it would come out of their cut.”
Darius turned to me, studying my face as he thought about that. “Drawings are easily transported and easily hidden. But why this room? The thieves came all the way across this floor of the building to get here, and they went back and forth to the Dutch room several times, according to the motion sensors.”
I went back to the door we’d entered and stood with my back to it. An older man with a cane excused himself and I let him pass by, then I studied the Short Gallery for a few seconds before walking across it to the window. The view looked down onto Palace Avenue and the main entrance, and suddenly I understood.
“This was the lookout station. One of them checked for police while the other grabbed the paintings from the Dutch Room.”
Darius came to join me at the window. “Of course. Whoever planned this thing sent the thieves in here to watch for cops, and also gave them their list of drawings to take.” He smelled so good that I had to take a half-step back, just so I didn’t throw myself at him.
“It makes more sense that it was planned rather than opportunistic,” I said, because talking was more socially acceptable than sniffing the man, “otherwise whoever was on lookout would have raided the cabinet for any drawing by a recognizable name. And Michelangelo is pretty fricking recognizable.”
The ghost of a smile passed over his lips, and I gave myself one point for cleverness, one point for self-restraint, and a half a point for whatever it was that made the man’s mouth twitch.
Darius’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the screen before muttering under his breath that he had to take the call. He left the room, and after a moment’s hesitation, I followed him out. He was already walking down the stairs to the East Cloister where he finally paused at the railing that overlooked the courtyard.
I waited until he’d finished his call before I approached. He looked up from his phone with a serious expression.
“I need to go meet Markham Gray.” His eyes searched mine, presumably looking for guilt. I had none where his client was concerned.
“Can I come?”
That surprised him, and I gave myself another point. “Why?” he asked.
I smiled. “I’ve heard he has great art.”
Darius stared at me in complete shock for one very long moment, and then he burst into laughter. I gave myself three whole points and a very stern talking-to about falling for the opposition.