Then again, I always did think Chris Farley was a cutie.
We were in Eddie's office, which was just inside the main doors of the museum. His office looked a little like Mission Control, minus all the nerds in white short-sleeved, button-down dress shirts. There were ten monitors placed in and around his desk, all providing live feeds from within the museum. While we sat, he cycled through some exterior cameras and some back-room cameras. All in all, there were over twenty cameras situated throughout the small museum.
Eddie leaned back in his swivel chair, a chair that looked abused and ready to give out. I was sitting in a metal foldout chair he had grabbed from a storage closet behind him. The cold metal was almost as cold as my own flesh.
Eddie, to his credit, rarely took his eyes off the monitors. There was a Starbucks coffee sitting next to a keyboard. The keyboard had old coffee stains on it. I wondered how many keyboards Eddie had fried spilling his coffees.
"Would you mind telling me about the night the crystal sculpture was stolen?" I asked.
He shrugged defensively. "Like any other night."
I waited. Eddie stared at the monitors. Apparently that's all I was getting.
I said, "So nothing out of the ordinary?"
"Nothing other than our back-room cameras suddenly stopped working."
"Did the theft take place in the back room?"
"Wow, you're good," he said, still not looking at me. "It's no wonder they hired you."
I ignored the remark. "How long were the cameras not working?"
"Twenty-one minutes."
"Did you catch this immediately?"
He shook his head. "Both pictures were frozen in place. How they did it, we have no clue. But the image looked fine, until I noticed the timer had stopped."
"And how long until you noticed that?"
"Thirty, forty minutes."
"Long enough for the egg to be stolen."
"Yes."
"Could have happened to anyone," I said.
He squinted at me, trying to decide if I was being as big of an asshole as he was, and finally decided that I wasn't. He relaxed a little. "I guess so, yes."
"Where in the back room did the theft occur?"
He pointed to one of the images on the screen. "There. The shipping and receiving room. We had just received the collection from the artist himself."
"And does the artist know of the theft?"
"Not yet, as far as I'm aware."
"When is the exhibit set to debut?"
"One week."
"And the cameras caught nothing?"
"Not a thing."
"Was anything else stolen?"
"Just the crystal egg."
I knew the museum had insurance to cover such a loss, but there was no insurance to cover one's reputation. From what I understood, the theft would be a black eye that the museum could ill afford.
I said, "Other than security guards, does anyone else work the night shift?"
"No, although sometimes the docents and museum staff put in late hours, especially when a new exhibit is about to open."
"Were any of the museum staff working the night the sculpture was stolen?"
"Yes, but they had left hours before."
"How many security guards typically work the night shift?"
"We have four working after hours. Ten when the museum is open. We only have three working tonight."
"Why's that?"
Now Eddie looked pissed. "No clue. Thad never showed."
"What's Thad's full name?"
"Thad Perry."
"Was Thad working on the night in question?"
"No."
"Has he ever not shown up before?"
"Never."
"So you would call this unusual behavior?"
"Extremely."
"May I have a list of the names and numbers to all four security guards working that night?"
Eddie nodded once and slowly eased forward. He tapped a few keys at his keyboard, somehow avoiding knocking his coffee over in the process. This time. He wrote down four names and four phone numbers on a mini-sized pad of legal paper. He handed me the paper. His name was on the list.
"At the time of the theft, where were you?"
Eddie looked at me long and hard. I wasn't getting a guilty hit from Eddie. But I was getting a hostile one. He said, "I was here, manning the desk."
"The whole night?"
"Yes," he said, "the whole night."
"What about bathroom breaks?"
He jabbed a thumb behind him toward the small storage room. A storage room that, I saw, doubled as a small bathroom. "I take my potty breaks in there."
"Who on this list is working tonight?"
"Just Joey."
"I'd like to talk to Joey."
"Of course."
"Were any other private investigators hired to work the case?" I asked.
He nodded. "You and two other private dicks."
He grinned and flicked his gaze toward my crotch. He enjoyed being crude in my presence. I wondered if he would enjoy being dropped into a Jacuzzi from a fourth story balcony.
Crudeness aside, it made sense to hire more than one detective. People did it all the time. When a customer found a human finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili, Wendy's hired over ten private eyes to break the case, which one of them finally did. The finger belonged to one of the customer's friends, a finger he had lost in an industrial accident. The friends then cooked up a scheme, no pun intended, and it might have worked if not for the tenacity of one detective, and the foresight of Wendy's to hire a slew of them.
"Has anyone made any headway?" I asked.
He flicked his gaze at me sideways. Cool as cool gets. "The egg is still missing if that answers your question."
"Oh, most definitely. I'd like to see the back room now."
He reached inside his desk and handed me a generic security badge. "It's a temporary badge. Swipe it, then key in '0000'. And I'll send Joey over, too."
He showed me on the monitors where to find the back room. I thanked him for his time. Eddie nodded once.
Too cool to nod twice.
Chapter Thirty-three
I could almost feel Eddie watching me as I worked my way through the museum, past exhibits called Native American Art and Ancient Art of China. I wondered what my butt looked like on camera. Probably cute. Maybe a little bubbly, since my daughter called me bubble butt sometimes.
I made my way through the Spirits and Headhunters collections, stopping briefly to ogle at a half dozen shrunken heads.