"Uh … uh …"
Jo slapped her knee and said, "I think that's a great idea Sid."
Adam just continued to, "Uh … well … uh …"
Taking pity on him Mac said, "Great presentation and the mess spectacular; however, I'd like to see how this equipment works with an actual crime scene."
Adam looked at his watch, then held up a finger before jogging over to a bank of sensors and external memory drives. Looking up he said, "If you don't mind potentially having to deal with a couple of glitches, we can go down to the Virtopsy room now and see if this puppy works the way I hope it does."
Rather than give a verbal answer, Mac nodded and headed towards the elevators.
# # # # # # # # # #
There were indeed a few glitches but they were minor and quickly addressed and that actually gave the CSIs a greater appreciation of the system … and of Adam's technical skills. The virtual Roof Top Garden crime scene was finally displayed and Mac had called all of the CSIs in … as well as Don Flack who'd just dropped by to pick up a report … to experience the newest advancement in their lab's capabilities.
Lindsey Messer walked around staring and finally spoke for them all when she said, "This is amazing!"
Adam nodded. "Marcus is going to completely geek out. I gotta call him. Depending on his schedule he may fly out just to check out how his baby is performing. I can't believe how easy it was to patch the projection program from the scene replicator so that it would function with the projection cameras here in the virtopsy room."
Flack said, "I know these crates ain't real … hell I'm walking through them. But the next person that puts their foot through the vic there …"
Jo nodded. "I know. It's so freaky. It's like we're … ghosts passing through solid objects."
Her words jolted Adam's memory. "Oh … Boss … Emi sent over copies of all of her research and duplicates of her sketches and stuff that she did for the theater's exhibit on Olivia Toms. She was telling me about it last night after we put Charlie to bed."
Danny looked at him and said, "I take it that it's not a fit subject for the kiddies."
"No," Adam said making a face, remembering the bruise shin he'd gotten when Emi had kicked him under the table for bringing it up during dinner. "She was only twenty-five years old when she died and even today some of what she was into would cause a scandal. At a minimum she would have been constant fodder for the rag mags."
Mac was reluctant to end the demonstration but he knew everyone needed to get back to the work of solving this case. Sighing he said, "Danny, you and Hawkes examine the scene and see if anything stands out. Adam, bring Emi's work to my office and let's go over it and see if there's anything useful or ties in with the vic."
# # # # # # # # # #
Back in Mac's office the two men started displaying Emi's work on the boards that Mac kept in there for just such a purpose.
Mac was silent for a while, enthralled by the realism of the artwork. It was easy to mistake some of them for photographs. Yet despite the stylistic emphasis on the mundane and ordinary, she often captured the facet of a person or object that escaped the average eye. There was a convex mirror in one of her paintings that was so realistic that it was an illusion. "Adam, I know you likely hear this a great deal but Emi's work is extraordinary."
"Yeah, I hear it," Adam agreed. "I just wish Emi did."
Mac stopped what he was doing and turned to ask, "Excuse me?"
"What I mean is she hears the words but they don't really register. She honestly doesn't consider what she does … I mean it's personally satisfying to her, especially if something requires her to stretch her talents, but she doesn't really recognize what she does as significantly artistic. It's like she has a bad connection in her hardwiring … which is probably about as close to reality as anyone will be able to get to understand it. She recognizes other people's art, really gets stuff that just frankly does nothing for me, but her own work? It's like she only can see it as a means to an end. I think that's one of the reasons why she gravitated into forensics rather than into art for art's sake. For instance, you've seen the work she did down in our basement."
"Yes," Mac answered, thinking of the unusual interior design Emi and Adam had created. "Emi said the ideas were yours."
"Ha! I might have had a few ideas but Emi took that and … and … geez … fleshed the sketches out and brought them to life. Everything is geometric and modern yet the materials she used and the décor isn't harsh or cold. I can't explain it exactly, I just know that … that I can go down there after a rough case and … and …" Adam turned and looked at Mac before saying, "It's home in the same way the lab was always more my home than my apartment was. The apartment was where I slept … the lab is where I lived. Now it's like I have two homes … the lab is still my home but so's the house. Last night Emi handed me a plate of cookies and told me to go relax so I could think. I started walking down to the basement before I realized what I was doing. And it worked. I was able to think all the thoughts I needed to and then put them in the right compartment without becoming exhausted and stressed out. And Emi … she created that space for me. She wanted me to know that I had a place in the house even though it was filled to the rafters with her memories of her family. It was like her way of welcoming … and somehow she just knew me in a way that … that … never mind." Adam shook his head.
"Actually I know what you mean. Christine and I decided since her place was bigger and closer to the restaurant that it just made more sense for me to sell mine and move into hers. Yet, Christine seemed to … to delight in making the place ours yet finding a way that I could still have a corner that was all mine … one that I could … retreat to when I needed to. She turned the downstairs bedroom into a den where I keep the things that we didn't integrate into the rest of the place. Not to have a place for those items but so that I would have a place … one that was mine in a way that the restaurant is hers and the rest of the house is ours."
"Exactly," Adam said.
Mac reached into the box and pulled out the last item, a thick binder containing a lot of handwritten notations along the borders of photocopied articles from magazines and other resources. "What's this?" he asked.
Adam answered, "Short answer is that it is a chronological timeline of Olivia Toms' life. Part biography, part research paper. Before you start reading you want the Cliff Note's version?"
"Please," Mac said on with a sardonic grin.
"Olivia Toms was born in 1894. Her birth name was Olivia Duff and she was born into a poor, working class family. Her father died in an industrial accident leaving her mother to raise her and a couple of younger siblings on what little bit she could earn in a factory job. From the time she was very young, Olivia was left to raise her younger siblings while her mother worked in a textile mill. When her youngest sibling finally became school age Olivia took a job in a local department store. At sixteen she escaped the drudgery of being her siblings' caretaker for the drudgery of marriage to an older man, Krug Toms. The marriage didn't even last a year due to abuse by the hard drinking Toms. Olivia Toms quickly found work to support herself in a department store and on a lark entered a local beauty contest which she easily won. Before she was eighteen Olivia won the title of 'Most Beautiful Girl in New York City.' With the title came notice by influential men, one of whom was Florenz Ziegfeld and in no time Olivia became one of the famous Ziegfeld Follies girls."
Mac leaned against the desk, crossed his arms, and became interested in the biography despite himself.
"The story goes that men went wild for her and in short order she was living a very … er … sexually free-spirited lifestyle that was practiced by many of the Ziegfeld girls as well as the fast crowd they ran with. I mean there's stories of wild parties, orgies, drugs, alcohol and just some really crazy things. Some of her exploits are just the stuff of legends but it is provable that she posed nude for several famous painters, one of whom was Alberto Vargas. You do know who Alberto Vargas was don't you Boss?"
Mac chuckled. "Actually I do. He was famous for his pin up girl paintings. I remember my father and his friends …" Mac shook his head still smiling.
Adam's eyes lit with humor. "Yeah. My Uncle Brian had a few of those too. He's actually the one that explained about … er … anyway, the resulting artwork went for huge amounts of money. It made Olivia Toms even more famous and it next led her to be signed to do Silent Pictures. She did her first one in 1916 at the age of twenty-two and was an instant success. That same year she married Jack Pick, the brother of another famous silent movie star, despite his family disapproving of the match. Their personalities and lifestyles caused the marriage to be tumultuous from the beginning; nor was it helped by the amount of work coming Olivia's way. In 1917 alone she made four films, in 1918 she made three, and in 1919 she made six. She was the toast of town on both coasts. She and Jack lived hard, played hard, and were in high demand at every party and special event. Jack was often jealous of the attention paid to his wife but at the same time encouraged it as a way for both of them to keep working in the Hollywood of that era though there is no doubt that he was never even close to being in her league as an actor. In 1920 however they decided to take a step back from what their life had turned into – it was still early days and Olivia had already made three successful films that year. The couple took a trip to France to try and repair the damage all of the fast living had done to their relationship."
"Did they succeed?"
"They might have except that's where the scandal comes in."
"Scandal."
"Yep. Rather than slow down and renew their commitment which is what their stated purpose had been for the trip, Jack and Olivia simply transferred their fast life from one side of the Atlantic to the other. They also continued arguing, sometimes violently, though people who knew them said that's simply the result of two volatile and dramatic personalities living together. Most people counted them as being desperately in love and all of that other melodramatic mumbo-jumbo. What is a fact is that both Jack and Olivia drank quite a bit. One night after a party they returned to the rooms they shared and apparently drunk is in the eye of the beholder. Some reports have them only mildly inebriated and some reports have them falling down drunk, either way most of the investigators stated that the faculties of both were at least slightly compromised that night. Jack stated that he was in the living room of their hotel suite finishing a cigarette and waiting for Olivia to get out of the bathroom so he could take care of his own ablutions and head to bed because they had an early appointment the next day. Then he heard Olivia scream and he rushed to her only to find her in shock on the bathroom floor. He immediately called for the hotel doctor and he determined that she'd ingested bi-chloride of mercury."
"That stuff is pretty damn caustic."
"It is and within the week she died of nephritis."
"Her kidneys failed."
Adam nodded. "Pretty much. Probably most of her organs were failing at that point. Then came the coroner's investigation."
"I take it because someone thought it was suspicious."
Adam nodded again. "Because she'd died of poisoning and there were some witnesses that claimed that Olivia and Jack had been fighting quite heavily that day … but in the end the coroner found death by accidental self-poisoning. The bottle was labeled in French and the bathroom had been dark … and the woman was at least a little drunk. The problem was that Jack would have known exactly what the stuff was because … get this … it was what he'd been prescribed to treat a case of syphilis."
"Not an unreasonable finding even with it having been her husband's prescription. Unfortunately, STDs weren't exactly unknown during that era, especially given their reported promiscuity. So why the ghost story?"
"According to Emi there is no good reason. Basically it was one of the earliest big Hollywood scandals and she was a beautiful and famous woman who died a horrible death. And some of her husband's statements to the paparazzi of the day were also a little suspect."
"For instance?"
"He said she spoke to him while she was hospitalized, kept telling him everything would be okay and even the day before she died, when it was obvious she was failing, she still seemed to think that after a short rest she'd be all right and they would go back to the States and continue on with their lives. But given the coroner's statement concerning the damage to her throat I doubt the woman was doing any speaking. Hell, I doubt she was even awake given the amount of opiates they were giving her for the pain she was in. Then there was Jack's attempted suicide on the boat coming back with her body. He was almost constantly drunk from the day of Olivia's death and required a watcher the entire time … some people said it was grief, some said it was guilt. What is a fact is that after being cleared by an additional investigation here, he sobered up long enough to remarry to someone more to his family's liking. That marriage however ended in divorce, and the only reason his third marriage lasted is because he died before divorce proceedings could be completed. He was only thirty-six."
"What did he die of?"
"Multiple neuritis, probably brought on by his alcoholism and drug abuse. Or perhaps by the medications prescribed to treat his syphilis that contained high levels of mercury. It's all pretty hypothetical."
Mac slowly nodded. "I can see where this would make one hell of a play. The question for us is how does this connect to our vic."