Chapter 14 – The Focus Narrows
Eighteen hours after he sat down at the museum’s security computer the geek sent his mother an email telling her he’d be home the next day and they’d be able to get the refrigerator fixed and have regular milk for their coffee instead of the canned stuff. He didn’t tell her he’d be bringing home $10K, knowing if he did she’d find a way to get hold of it, and he wanted to spend some of it, maybe all of it, on new computer games like “The Devils of Narnia” and “Spartan Goddess of Lore” and “Ozzy Osborne’s Wizards”.
It took him ten minutes to be able to stand up straight after he pried himself out of his chair, those eighteen hours having done a number on his vertebrae. He went to the printer, collected his report, and found Tommy in his office. He said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
Tommy looked at the report, set it on the desk, and said, “I take it you found something. Gimme the short version; I’ll read the details later.”
“Ok, this is really cool. The system they got here is pretty good, but the guy who cracked it is better. A lot better. He’s as good as it gets. Not only did he turn the whole thing off, which would have been enough to let the crooks get in, but then he turned it back on. The guy has a sense of humor.”
Tommy assumed this was geek humor and didn’t try to plumb its depths. “What else?”
“That ain’t all. After he turned it back on, nice guy that he is, not wanting to let anyone else come in and steal somethin’, then he took the time to cover his tracks. Wipe out all traces of what he’d done. Thing of beauty.”
Tommy assumed this was geek aesthetics and didn’t try to plumb its depths. Patiently he said, “What else?”
“You ain’t gonna believe where this guy is. Or was when he did it.”
Tommy said, “You can tell where he was? Can you tell who he is?”
The geek had to stand up again and stretch, his back and legs trying to regress into the double right angle shape it had assumed during the eighteen hour cyber hunt. Proudly he said, “Yeah, I can tell you where he was, and I can tell you the IP address of his computer.” Less proudly, thinking Tommy was being unfair, didn’t he know how hard this shit is, said, “Sorry, can’t give you a person’s name, but I can give you an approximate location. The last page of the report is a Google Earth image of that. Check it out.”
Tommy picked up the report and turned to the last page, on which he saw a satellite image of several square blocks of large buildings in a city. Really large buildings surrounded by wide streets. He looked at the geek and said, “Where’s this?”
“Russia. Saint Petersburg. The fucking Hermitage Museum. Huge. Ten square blocks.”
“The guy that turned off the computer here, was there?”
The geek nodded and said, “That’s what I mean when I say I can’t tell the exact location. Must be a thousand computers in that place. What I know is the guy is great. An artist.”
Tommy looked at the image and then at the guy standing across from him with the odd senses of humor and aesthetics, and then back at the image. Jesus. All the way from Russia. What's the connection from there to here, quaint little Charleston, South Carolina? He picked up his cell, speed dialed his boss and told her to pay the geek, who thought, ‘Back to mom and the games’, and left.
Same time next day the art historian came into his office and dropped her report on his desk, Tommy thinking, ‘Where does Granite get these people,’ but then remembered he was one of them too, a pawn in her hands, high performing, a geek in his own right. Investigator geek. Can someone who looks like Steve McQueen be a geek? Are there any handsome geeks out there, can that be part of the geek profile? He said, “Wha’ed you find?”
She said, “The art part was straight forward. The artist was French, married an American woman from a family that owned a bunch of plantations here. He came over, spent the rest of his life here doing portraits for rich people. He was formally trained in Paris and was a very good artist. This painting is beautiful. You think you’re going to get it back?”
“Definitely,” said Tommy, in a way that made the woman believe him.
She went on, “The genealogy was easy....” and then stopped, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I should have said the genealogy was really hard, that way I might get paid more, pretend I’ve been slaving away here.’
Tommy saw what was going on, said, “Don’t worry, sounds like you earned your full fee,” smiled at her.
“Great, thanks. The genealogy was all there, available in some books in this library and then online. The woman in the painting is Gwendolyn Bedgewood, and she was married to Manigault Bedgewood, who was rich until he died in 1825. It probably was painted in the living room of one of his houses here, not sure which one because he had a big house here in town on East Bay Street that burned down in the great fire of 1863, and also had plantation houses outside town. She was a big time socialite, and had three guys fight duels over her, not even with her husband, but with other guys, so I guess she was a hot number that got under some skins. It was fun reading about her, and it’s too bad there aren’t some wild women like her around today. That would make things more interesting.”
Tommy liked this woman and thought it was too bad she had to live vicariously through her art history. He motioned for her to go on.
“The Bedgewood family is alive and well, even though a bunch of them were killed in the Civil War, and I don’t have to tell you what side they were on. And some of ole Manigault’s money survived the historic tribulations and made it down through the years. There still are Bedgewoods in Charleston, the whole tree with marriages and births and deaths is in the report.”
Tommy looked at the report and found the section with the lines and arrows and names in tiny font that composed the family tree. He picked up his cell, dialed the Granite lady, and told her to pay the woman. Ms. Granite said, “That’s twenty-thousand I just paid out. When you gonna give me the name of the thief?”
“Sooner or later.”
She said, “Make it sooner,” and hung up, all peaches and cream.
Tommy looked at the art historian and asked, “Am I going to be able to find the Bedgewoods that are alive now, in the report? Can I understand all those lines and arrows and things?”
She picked up the report, turned to the genealogy section, and said, “It’s easy to follow. Here at the bottom of the tree is today, and it looks like....umm....looks like there are thirteen descendants still alive. For example, there’s a woman that married a guy named Roger June about twenty years ago; she’s one of the thirteen. You should be able to understand how it’s laid out, no problem.”
Tommy said, “So, like, for example, this woman alive today has the family genes? Down from Gwendolyn Bedgewood?” The woman nodded. “What’s her name?”
Well, her maiden name was Gwen Bedgewood. Now it’s Gwen June.”
Tommy nodded.