He was turning the charm on now, trying to play up to Chapman and work the hardship angle to his advantage.

Eve Drexler hung up the phone and came back to the table. “Mr. Lissen will be here in ten minutes. I’ve ordered a fresh pot of coffee. And I’ve asked some of the curators who might be useful to your inquiry to be on standby.” She was a model of efficiency.

“Thank you.” The director picked up his folder again and continued to scrutinize the entries. Eve walked behind us to gather the empty mugs from which Mike and I had been drinking. She left them on an enameled tray on a satinwood commode next to the door, turning back to remove Thibodaux’s and replace it with a fresh one. She picked up the photograph of the dead girl that he had been using as a coaster and took it over to his desk, peeking at it with curiosity as she placed it on the blotter.

I watched her reaction as she reached for the picture again. “Pierre, didn’t you recognize this young woman? She was here for meetings with us a number of times last year. Look again. I think it’s Katrina Grooten.”

Thibodaux walked to his desk, opened the drawer, and removed a pair of reading glasses from a metal case. He studied the photograph and shrugged his shoulders.

“I meet so many young people here, Detective. You must forgive me.” He looked at his assistant. It wasn’t a glare, but it seemed to me that it was a signal for her to back off. “I’m sure I don’t recall any specifics, Eve. Is there any reason Miss Grooten should have stood out to me?”

Eve had resumed her place at the table and picked up her notebook. “I might be mistaken, Pierre. It’s possible you had nothing to do with her at all.”

“Did she work for us?” he asked, looking perplexed.

“Not here. At the Cloisters.”

Most of the Met’s collection of medieval art is housed in the Cloisters, the dismantled elements of several European monasteries that were shipped to America by a prominent sculptor in the early 1900s, and then given to the museum by John D. Rockefeller. The magnificent setting is in northern Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River.

“Are you familiar with-?”

Before Thibodaux could finish the question, Mike had to prove that his knowledge of the Met wasn’t limited to just one branch. “Fort Tryon Park. Thirty-fourth Precinct.” I didn’t need a reminder of our last trip to that neighborhood, when we had investigated the murder of a prominent art dealer.

“I’m not sure what the girl did there,” Eve continued, “but she was working on some aspect of the big bestiary exhibition we’re doing with the Museum of Natural History next spring, the one that was just announced last evening. We had several planning sessions in this office. Of course, Mr. Thibodaux is abroad so frequently that I may have been mistaken that he was present for any of them.”

“It’s a terrible pity that this-this victim-is someone from our own family.” The director was exhibiting the appropriate degree of remorse for us now. It was impossible for me to read his expression and know whether he was the least bit sincere.

“Wouldn’t someone from the museum have missed her?”

“I’ll have to get them to pull her personnel file, Mr. Chapman,” Eve Drexler said, turning a page to make a list of things to do. “What else will you need?”

“Everything you’ve got. Who she worked with, what she did, where she lived, when she started here, and when she left. Of course, we’ll need someone to identify the body. How well did you know her, Ms. Drexler?”

The woman was clearly not used to being the center of attention. She was the backup to the boss, but wasn’t supposed to be involved herself. “I-uh-I can’t say that I knew her at all. I mean, we were both at this table together two or three times, but-”

“You came up with her name pretty quick.”

“I’m good at remembering names and faces, Detective. I have to be.”

“That’s-as you say in English-not my forte, Mr. Chapman. Eve stands at my shoulder at all our receptions, whispering in my ear as people approach.” Thibodaux’s smile seemed forced. “It seems the larger their collections, the more likely I am to block out their names when I need them most. It’s a dangerous thing when you’re courting potential donors, trying to get them to include the Met in their estate planning. They each want to believe that they have become my best friend.”

“Did you talk to her at all, one-on-one? Find out anything about her?”

“Well, I remember making small talk with her,” Drexler said, forefinger pressed against her forehead, as though digging for her recollections. “She had an accent, and since so many of our curatorial staff are from all over the world, naturally I inquired where she was from. You know, waiting for the meeting to get under way. I guessed Australia, but I was wrong. She is-she was, I’m sorry-she was South African.”

“Dutch name, right?” Chapman asked.

“Yes, we also talked about that. Her family had been there for almost two hundred years. Boers.” Dutch settlers who had moved to the African continent as early as the seventeenth century.

“Keep going. What else did she tell you?”

“That she worked at the Cloisters, of course. Here on some kind of visa. I don’t remember any other conversation. She seemed rather shy. Didn’t speak up at the meetings, didn’t really participate very much.”

Mike pointed at her leather notebook. “You take minutes?”

“Yes, I usually did.” She looked down the length of the table, at Thibodaux, as though she was seeking his advice.

“I’d like to see those.”

The director took his cue. “I’ll have Eve find them. We’ll have to figure out the relevant dates in order to do that.”

Ten minutes with Eve Drexler and you knew she could put her fingers on them in an instant. She was the assistant we all wanted. Roughly fifty years old, memory like a steel trap, polite to a fault, willing to take the heat for the boss, and compulsively organized. There was probably a diary for every day she had worked with the director.

“How long have you been assisting Mr. Thibodaux?”

“Actually, I’ve been here a few more years than he has.” She was blushing, now that the focus of the discussion had moved toher life and actions.

I tried to warm her up by engaging her on a personal level. “Would you mind telling us what your duties are?”

“Certainly, if that will help you with what you need. I came here as a graduate student almost twenty-five years ago. I was planning to spend my career as a museum archivist. That was my training, you see. But Mr. Thibodaux’s predecessor thought the things that made me such a good librarian, if you will, would be helpful to him.”

Chapman called up his childhood image of the beloved school librarian. “Tight lips? That index finger held over your mouth, going ‘ssssssssh’ while I was trying to set up a football game after school with the other guys in the stacks, huh? What else?”

Drexler smiled at his reference. “Well, he certainly appreciated discretion, yes. And my knowledge of the collection. I spent a great deal of time cataloging entries and answering questions from staff and researchers-those who were too lazy to do the work themselves. And then, when Mr. Thibodaux took charge, he was gracious enough to keep me on.”

“When was that?”

The director answered for himself. “Not quite three years ago, Detective. I’m sure you want to know everything about my background as well. Miss Drexler can give you a copy of my curriculum vitae. I’m fifty-two years old, born and raised in Paris. My experience is all curatorial. I ran the European art and sculpture department at the Louvre for more than a decade. Welcomed the opportunity to move to this gem of a museum. My wife was a New Yorker. She very much wanted to come home.”