Chapter 19
Max’s father the lawyer agreed to meet the boys the next morning. Not in his office though, he insisted. He asked the boys to come by his house at eight in the morning and walk his dogs with him.
“Let’s keep this informal for now,” he’d said.
The next morning, shortly before they were to meet Max’s dad, Jack called Otis Black to see if the Souvlakis note had turned up.
“Hello?” it was a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Good morning,” said Jack, “I’m calling for Otis Black.”
“Yes,” she said, “are you the young man from the museum?”
“That’s right,” said Jack.
She said, “Otis told me that you might call. He said for me to tell you that the note is here at the house. He had to go into work early this morning. He got a call in the middle of the night and he said you’d probably know what that was about.”
“Yeah,” said Jack, “I think I do.”
“If you’d like, I can put the envelope in the mail for you,” she said.
“Can we come get it?” asked Jack, “where are you?”
“Near the Navy Yard,” she said, “K street.”
“In the city?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s not that far,” said Jack, “if it’s alright with you, I’d really like to come pick it up this morning.”
“That’s fine,” she said. She gave him the address.
Max and his family lived a short walk from the Bonney house. All three boys showed up promptly at eight. Despite scrubbing with soap and water and experimenting with various mixtures of vinegar, paint thinner, and an assortment of other things‘d found under the sink, both Jack and Cable remained distinctly purple. Jack had buttoned a clean shirt all the way up and wore a yellow tie with dark green stripes. Quinn, in recognition of the gravity of the situation, had changed out of his pajamas for the early morning meeting, but had thrown on a baseball cap instead of showering or brushing his hair. Cable wore all black, which did nothing to temper the purple, so he looked like either an eggplant or the Wicked Witch of the East, depending on which of his brothers’ jibes he chose to acknowledge.
Mr. Glover came out of the house to meet them. He wore a light gray suit. With silver rimmed glasses and a silver watch to go with his wispy gray hair, he was the model of a fastidious small town lawyer. The fact that he was being practically dragged down the front steps by three rambunctious golden retrievers did nothing to ruffle his composed demeanor.
He took in the tableau of the Bonney boys with a glance. They could see that he had already begun a mental case file.
“Max told me as much as he knew before leaving on the commuter train this morning,” said Mr. Glover, “when his version of the story left off, you were not purple. Please tell me you did not cap off your evening by knocking over a bank.”
They told him everything. When they’d exhausted the details and the dogs, Mr. Glover invited them down to his office. He worked in a Victorian mansion overlooking the river, in the block that transitioned from pre-Civil War houses at one end to a hipster coffee shop at the other. His office was in a small room on the second floor. He seated the boys, took out a legal pad, wrote the date at the top, and underlined it three times.
Then he jotted down several more lines. The boys waited. None of them had ever been in Mr. Glover’s office before. When he’d finished writing, he leaned back in his chair and pulled the legal pad into his lap.
He read, “Trespassing, using fake ID to gain admittance to a secure area, fleeing from police officers, breaking and entering, attempted robbery, or grand larceny potentially, destruction of government property, destruction of public property, something to do with the endangered species act, perhaps. Creating a public nuisance. Oh, and at some point Federal Agents may be arriving at your door to ask you whether you stole or assisted someone in stealing the National Gem Collection. Did I get everything?”
None of the boys responded.
Mr. Glover nodded.
“When are your parents getting back into town?” he asked.
“The boat gets to Southhampton in two days. If they get our message there’s a chance they might get off there and fly home. Otherwise it would be 6 days after that.”
“Paul and Emily too?” he asked.
Jack nodded.
“How old are you now, Quinn? And you, Cable. Jack, you’re Max’s age, right?”
Mr. Glover noted down everything on the legal pad.
“So what do we do?” asked Cable.
Across the desk from them, Mr. Glover pulled a sheet of paper out of the top drawer. He filled in a couple of the blanks and then slid it across the desk to the boys.
“The first thing is to hire me to represent you,” he said. “Unless you do that, I am under a moral obligation to report you.”
“Where do we sign?” asked Jack, snatching up the pen.
Once they’d all signed, Mr. Glover put the paper back in the desk drawer. Then he said, “it’s a little bit unusual for someone to hire a lawyer before they’ve been accused of anything. In most cases, that would look like an admission of guilt. However, you’re not denying that you’ve done any of this; is that right?”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t just make a list of crimes,” said Cable, “but basically. Yes.”
“And what you’d like to do is minimize the fallout,” continued Mr. Glover.
“And keep jail time to a minimum,” said Quinn.
Mr. Glover looked at him with pinched lips and did not smile.
“There are a couple things you can do,” he said, folding his hands on the desktop. “One is do nothing. Wait to see if anyone comes looking for you. If they don’t, all you have to do is not go back to the Smithsonian until the statute of limitations for prosecution runs out and live with the guilt for the rest of your lives. Of course, if they do come looking, you’d have to add avoiding arrest and obstruction to the list of charges.”
“I hope you’re listing options from worst to best,” said Cable.
“Another option is to call the Smithsonian’s legal council and, effectively, turn yourselves in. They would be justifiably upset, but surely your coming forward would look good for you. If we could get a jury trial, we would undoubtably use that to our advantage. But they would not want that and we don’t know what they’d ultimately accuse you of. If they make a case for the polar bear being a national treasure for example, it would go worse for you.”
“What about the gems?” asked Jack.
Mr. Glover looked at his legal pad again. “What gems?” he asked.
“The gems,” said Jack, “the missing gems.”
“Have you ever seen the gems?” asked Mr. Glover.
“No.”
“Do you even know what gems your talking about?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything that you did in the hopes of profiting from the discovery of the gems?”
“No.”
“Or is Cable’s entire theory based on an overheard conversation, perhaps taken out of context, and the unspectacular coincidence of finding taxidermy supplies in a taxidermists house and mistaking them for something other than glass eyes?”
“Uh, yeah. What you said.”
Well be sure to keep it that way,” said Mr. Glover. “The less you know about the gems the better.” Mr. Glover continued, “wouldn’t you say it’s safe to say that you simply got caught up in a boyish adventure? The museum after dark – what was the story, From the Mixed of Files of someone or other?”
“But that wasn’t really what we were—“ began Jack.
“From what you told me here,” interrupted Mr. Glover, “I interpreted it as you being concerned that Mr. Souvlakis might want his books back and you were taking extraordinary measures to find him, so that he would not lose his professional collection due to late payment of rent. Is that right?”
“Well. I guess it—“ began Jack.
“Was there going to be a third option,” asked Cable, “something where we find out what happened to Souvlakis and the gems and those Franklin & Rogers guys get put away?”
“You know what my favorite television show was, some time ago,” said Mr. Glover. “It was called Unsolved Mysteries. It came on at a time when every other channel was showing detective shows and police dramas where everything got neatly tied up in forty two minutes. I don’t know what happened to that show, but it was really something.”
“It got cancelled,” said Jack, “you can’t even get it on iTunes.”
Mr. Glover took a new manila file folder out of a side drawer. He tore off the page of notes he’d made and put it in the file folder. He also put the signed letter of retainer in the folder. Then he wrote Bonney on the tab of the folder in black pen.
“I will arrange to make the call to the Smithsonian later today,” he said, “as soon as I can find out whom I should be contacting. In the meantime, I suggest you go clean up the store.” He pushed the folder across the desk toward the boys. “Would you please give this to Janice on your way out and ask her to file it.”
Jack and Quinn stood up and Jack picked up the folder. Cable remained in his seat, “Wait,” he said, “I thought we were supposed to make the decision.”
“Cable!” hissed Jack.
“What?” said Cable, “still sitting.”
“Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, Cable stood up.
Jack thanked Mr. Glover. They left his office. On the staircase Cable said, “what the heck?”
“I know,” said Jack.
“What?” said Quinn.
“We’re just supposed to wash our hands of it?” whispered Cable.
“I know. I know,” said Jack.
“What’s the problem?” said Quinn.
They reached the bottom landing and headed out the front door.
“So it rubbed you the wrong way too?” asked Cable.
“Definitely,” said Jack.
“So are we heading up to DC to get Otis’s note from his wife?”
Jack didn’t say anything. They walked down the front steps of Mr. Glover’s building.
“Hey wait,” said Quinn, “you forgot to give the file folder to his secretary.”
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