The Heist

the fortune he’d earned snatching up distressed California farms, kicking the owners off their properties, and harvesting their crops using the cheapest laborpossible, thus becoming one of the state’s largest employers of illegal immigrants and a pillar of Mexico’s economy.
    Of course he didn’t build his museum in Mexico. He established the Roland Larsen Kibbee Art Collection in San Francisco, in a massive Pacific Heights mansion, modeled after a French château.
    Roland’s business practices clashed with the liberal ideals of his twenty-six-year-old curator Clarissa Hart, but her master’s degree in fine arts wasn’t getting her any work, she had $97,000 in student loans to pay off, and if she had to live another day with her parents, she’d smother them in their sleep. So she swallowed her ideals and took the paycheck each month from Roland. And while the Kibbee wasn’t the Guggenheim or the Getty, and the artwork, most of it nudes, made Clarissa feel like she was a hostess at the Playboy Mansion, she took solace in the fact that she was still a museum curator.
    The collection of paintings and objets d’art was displayed in hallways and intimate salons to make the visitors feel as if they were guests in Roland’s home, though the eighty-five-year-old agribusiness magnate had never lived there. He lived in Palm Beach, Florida, with a twenty-two-year-old stripper named LaRhonda who was waiting for him to die. After he breathed his last agonizing breath she hoped to get her hands on the Crimson Teardrop, a rare two-carat red diamond that was his latest acquisition.
    The Teardrop was also the Kibbee’s best shot at wide recognition, and in anticipation of the Crimson Teardrop’s opening-night display, the marble floors were being polished, the paneling was being restained, and the leather couches and armchairs were being replaced with new models. Clarissa was playing tour guide to SFPD Inspector Norman Peterson, who’d shown up to talk withher about traffic control during the exhibition and to make sure the museum had taken adequate security measures to protect the diamond.
    “I’ve driven by this place a thousand times and never noticed there was a museum here,” Peterson said, rubbing a mustache that looked like a very large caterpillar taking a nap under his bulbous nose.
    He wore his badge on a lanyard around his neck in what Clarissa assumed was an unsuccessful attempt to cover his big belly and the mustard stain on his tie. She placed him in his mid-thirties, though he wouldn’t see forty if he didn’t change his eating habits.
    She was right about the age, but wrong about everything else. Inspector Peterson was actually Nick Fox, padded to look fat, his face disguised by layers of expertly applied prosthetics and makeup.
    “We’re a boutique museum,” Clarissa said as they made their way around the crew that was putting the new furniture into place.
    “What’s that mean?”
    She could have said that it meant they were smaller, more intimate, and more carefully curated than larger museums, but something about him, and his absolute lack of pretension, changed her mind.
    “It means that people drive by this place a thousand times and never notice us.”
    “That’s a shame, because you’ve got some good stuff here.” Nick stopped to look at a life-size five-hundred-year-old marble statue of a naked woman sitting on a tree stump and clutching her left breast. “You’d think she’d have brought a pillow or a blanket to sit on.”
    “She was beyond those kinds of concerns.”
    “Nobody wants to get a splinter in their butt. Who was she?”
    “Aphrodite,” Clarissa said.
    “Don’t know her,” Nick said. “But keep in mind, you’re talking to a guy who walks through the Wax Museum on Fisherman’s Wharf and doesn’t recognize half of the supposedly famous people on display.”
    Clarissa gave him a look, just to check if he was teasing her, and decided that his remark was genuine. She’d never visited the Wax Museum but knew they probably got more visitors in a day than the Kibbee got in a month.
    “She’s the Greek goddess of love, Inspector. Her origin story is interesting. The young and envious Titan Cronus wanted to dethrone his father, Uranus, ruler of the universe. So Cronus cut off his father’s genitals with a scythe, threw them into the ocean, and Aphrodite rose up out of the frothy waves.”
    “And she symbolizes love?” Nick said. “That’s