Ex-Secretary Held as Police Sort Loot

A small grey statuette of an Eskimo is among the several thousand dollars worth of still unclaimed property recovered by Cambridge police last week from the apartment of Miss Margaret E. Canty, a former secretary in the Mineralogical Library.

Miss Canty is being held in East Cambridge Jail while police sort through about $25,000 of allegedly stolen property removed from her Concord Ave. Apartment. Detectives plan to obtain another search warrant to obtain other goods from the apartment.

Police had expected that a Harvard museum official would examine the statuette and some books from the apartment yesterday, but detectives said no one came. The soapstone figure has patches on it where there had apparently been two small labels, and it was speculated that the piece, possibly worth several hundred dollars, belongs to a museum or private gallery.

Several co-workers remembered that Miss Canty had given a series of "moderately wild" parties for graduate students and persons working in the Geological Department. She drove a battered car worth around $200 to work and dressed "on the poor side of average." Because of this, they said, there was some speculation as to where she got the money for the parties; but no one seriously suspected anything at the time.

Miss Canty was generally very well liked around the department, they said, because she was "usually cheerful and friendly," although they remembered that she often had unusually bad moods. A close friend also reported that she had known Miss Canty to make up several "tall stories about people," among them one about an imaginary brother-in-law. The friend said that Miss Canty later told how the "brother-in-law" had been killed in an auto accident.