Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair

  Chapter 11 – The Painting

  Tommy slept fitfully his first night in Charleston, his biorhythms still screwed up by the jetlag and his psyche disturbed by visions of the babe doppelgangers. The next morning he opened shop in a small office the museum Director gave him, and asked the Curator for a complete list of staff who had worked at the museum during the last ten years, along with their personnel files.

  The Curator said, “You think this was an inside job? No way.”

  “That’s what all managers think of their operation, but it happens all the time. How else did they get in and out of here, and not leave a trace? They had to know a lot about this place.”

  The Curator was shocked, but he could see the logic. How did they get in here without setting off the alarms? The security system had cost the museum $150,000. He still didn’t see how it could be a staff member, because they have to use a personal swipe card to set or disarm the system in the mornings and evenings. Tommy said, “I’m going to have to interview everyone, starting tomorrow. Today I’ll do a physical survey of the whole place, every nook and corner, inside and out. Can you help with that?”

  The Curator nodded and thought, ‘This is exciting, especially if it really was someone who works here, or worked here in the past. Who?’ Museums are not exactly beds of hot-blooded people, living the wild life of the criminal. The art world as a whole is different: plenty of criminals out there, forging, stealing, buying, selling. But not museum staff who as a whole are more similar to librarians in the level of their risk-taking behaviors. He went away for half an hour and returned with a box that held the files Tommy wanted.

  Tommy said, “Ready for the inspection?” And for the next seven hours they went into every gallery, every office, the boiler room, the labs, up on the roof, into the janitor’s closets, into the vaults and storerooms, and tramped through the bushes and garden plots outside the building. Everywhere, at the end of which Tommy knew the same thing as when he started, which was that it was an inside job. There hadn’t been a break-in, there had been a walk-in and a walkout. Simple, and not so simple, and the not so simple was figuring out which staff member had masterminded the theft and hired the accomplices. Obviously more than one person was involved, considering the size and weight of the painting. The simple part would come when he had identified the thief, and that was to crack him or her, museum staff as aforesaid not being hardened criminals but more like sponges, you just squeeze a little and everything comes out.

  He spent the following day reading through the manuals of the computer security system in the morning and the personnel files in the afternoon. While eating lunch with the Curator he asked, “How much did you spend on the computer setup? The hardware and the software?”

  “Umm, not really my field, but I remember it being brought up in a couple of staff meetings, and I think it was between $100,000 and $200,000. Seemed like a lot to me.”

  Tommy nodded and thought, ‘Not a great system, but not a bad one either. Should have done the job.’ He said, “No system is foolproof, and they do better protecting against break-ins than they do with inside jobs. Break-ins are hard to stop in advance or during the heist, but not that hard to solve afterwards.”

  “What do you look for in an inside job? How do you solve that?”

  “What you don’t have to figure out is opportunity, because that’s what an inside job is all about. The opportunity is there most of the time. So what you look for is motivation, same as for most crimes. Why did the person want to steal the painting? In the art world it’s usually not money, because it’s hard to sell famous works for a profit, unless it’s to a private individual who wants it only for personal gratification. Museum people do what they do because they like the stuff they work with every day, and sometimes they decide they want a real piece of the action.”

  “You really think it was someone who works here?”

  “Or worked here in the past, since the security system was installed, which was seven years ago,” said Tommy.

  “Could be anybody.”

  “Could be.”

  “And you’re going to figure out who?”

  “I am.”

  The Curator looked at the blue eyes looking at him, and was glad it wasn’t him that did the job. Cool blue eyes and no smile showing. What Tommy didn’t say was, ‘There’s more than one kind of inside job.’