Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair

  Chapter 13 – Tommy Sees the Light

  The day after he studied the computer manuals and the personnel files Tommy called Ms. Granite in New York and told her he needed two support staff in Charleston for a few days each: a computer security system specialist and an art historian. She understood and told him she’d have them down there pronto.

  They arrived late the next afternoon, and the following morning Tommy put them to work, the computer guy first. The directions were simple: do a forensics on the museum’s system for the day of the heist and see if there was anything fishy. Tommy knew there had to be. So the geek sat in the same chair at the security computer for the next eighteen hours straight, using the men’s room occasionally and having food brought up to him from the cafe. He was motivated by an unsmiling Ms. Granite who told him if he found what Tommy thought was there (really there, not planting something himself, which she had no doubt this guy could do), he’d earn $10K, and if he didn’t he could go back to flogging computers at Office Depot. Tommy told the museum staff not to talk to the guy because a computer geek in action has powers of concentration second only to chess masters.

  After psychologically attaching the guy to the system by issuing the forensic challenge, Tommy took the art historian to the small museum library where they sat with the Curator. Tommy handed the woman a photo of the Bedgewood painting and said, “I want to know everything about this painting: the artist, the social setting at the time it was painted, and most importantly, the woman. Who she was, why the artist painted her, her family. He looked at the historian and said, “Can you do genealogy stuff?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Do you know how to do family research? Figure out family lines and ancestors?”

  “Sure. That’s a basic part of art history, and besides that I’ve done it for my own family. It’s fun.”

  “Ok, good. Do that for this Bedgewood woman in the picture. Thanks, and let me or him know if you need anything.”

  Tommy and the Curator left the library and went down to the cafe for coffee, where the Curator said, “What’s up with the genealogy stuff? You said it was an inside job, someone who works here now or did in the past.”

  “That’s one kind of inside job, the most common type, so I have to look at that very carefully. But there are other types too, where it’s not an employee, but someone who knows something about the place, or can figure out an important chink in the armor, and then use that information. Sometimes it's someone who has a special skill that fits with a certain type of crime at a certain place and time. That type of job is a lot harder to solve than the employee one, and I have a feeling that’s what we may be looking at here.”

  The Curator said, “You operate on feelings? I thought investigators used scientific deduction, cold rationality.”

  “That’s the Sherlock Holmes thing, and it’s part of it. But there’s also the cop’s hunch thing. You’ve heard of that a lot too, and it’s also important. The investigator sees something, and it triggers a hunch.”

  “Something did that to you, huh? What was it?”

  Tommy didn’t answer, but stared off into space, in his mind’s eye seeing the images of the beautiful blond doppelgangers, twins living two hundred years apart.