by Anthony Rome
“Almost,” I told her.
“Almost? What in the world does that mean?”
“I’m not sure myself.”
“Sounds to me,” she said angrily, “like you’re giving me the old run-around. I’m tempted to just tell my father I lost the pin and get it off my chest.”
“Good idea,” I told her. “Why don’t you?”
“I was going to. But Rita still doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”
Suddenly, Rita Kosterman’s voice came through the connection, “That’s right. I don’t.”
“Rita!” Diana Pines blurted. “I didn’t know you were—”
“I just picked up the extension in my room to make a call,” Rita told her. Then she said to me: “Mr. Rome, it’s not your business to give us personal advice. You’re supposed to be finding that pin. Do you mean to say you haven’t managed to locate it yet?”
Instead of answering, I asked, “Was a copy ever made of any of your jewelry? That pin in particular?”
“No,” Diana said. “Of course not.”
It was Rita who demanded quietly, “Why do you ask that?”
“What’s the name of the company that insures your jewelry?” I asked.
“I don’t see why that concerns you,” Rita said. “Diana’s already told you we don’t want the insurance company brought into this. That’s why she hired you.”
“I’m not going to inform the insurance company the pin’s been lost,” I told them patiently. “But I need some information from them. To find the pin.”
It was Diana who told me the name of the insurance company.
My next call was to Ned Baum, a staff claims investigator I knew at that insurance company.
It took Baum a while to dig what I wanted out of the company files. I waited, smoked two Luckies, and fingered the daisy pin. When Baum came back on the line and said he had the list of insured Kosterman gems in his hand, I gave him a detailed description of the pin. It matched a pin described on the insurance list.
“It’s insured for full value,” Baum told me. “Thirty-one hundred dollars.”
Which meant that the pin had once been the real stuff. The company would have had it appraised before issuing insurance on it.
“Anything in your records about a copy ever having been made of this pin?” I asked Baum.
“Nope.”
I had him describe the other items of jewelry on the list. There weren’t too many pieces, but a few of them, like an emerald necklace and a ruby tiara, were worth hefty sums. All in all, Kosterman had bought one hundred and sixty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry for his present wife, and a little under twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth for his daughter.
The daisy pin was the least expensive item on the list.
“What’s up?” Baum demanded.
“Nothing for you to worry about.”
“You didn’t want all this info just to pass the time. If something’s doing with these gems, don’t let me get caught being the only one not in the know about it.”
“I won’t,” I promised him. “If it looks like somebody’s trying a chisel on the insurance, I’ll let you know.”
After I hung up the phone, I sat a while longer behind my desk, gazing at the daisy pin.
Then I dropped it in my pocket and went out.
After lunching on a cheeseburger and a milk shake at a drive-in, I began my car prowl of Miami’s jewelry establishments. I spent the rest of the afternoon at it, showing the daisy pin each place I went.
Shadows were lengthening into dusk, and I was about ready to call a halt to it for the day, when I entered the basement workshop of Hendrik Ruyter in Hialeah.
Ruyter was a private contractor who did gem cutting and jewel setting for various jewelry firms in the area. He was a small man, with a thick head of white hair and a big apron- covered stomach. When I came down the steps into his little workshop, he was at a bench, fitting a stone into a silver setting.
He looked up at me with a good-natured smile. “Something I can do for you, sir?”
I took out the daisy pin and showed it to him. “Recognize this?”
He took it from me, looked at it, weighed it in his small hand, nodded. “Yes. Of course. This I did a month ago. Maybe a little more.” He got out his jewelers glass and studied the pin through it for a few seconds. Then he dropped the glass back into his apron pocket, gave me back the pin, and nodded again. “Yes.
The weariness of the hours of prowling the city dropped from me. “You’re sure?”
“Of course. I always remember my own work. My customer wished the diamonds removed from this setting and these imitation stones substituted. This I did.”
“You do much of that kind of work?”
“Some. It is a common job. People buy expensive jewelry. Then they need money. But they don’t want their friends to know they have been forced to sell their jewelry. So they take it to a jewelry store, which sends it to me. I substitute imitation gems for the real ones. The people sell the gems to the store, keep the setting with the false stones, and none of their friends are the wiser. A common thing.”
“Who’d you do this job for?”
Hendrik Ruyter eyed me for a moment. Still smiling, but cautious, he asked, “You are a policeman?
I got out my wallet, showed him my credentials.
They were impressive enough for him. “I did this work for Jules Langley.”
“Who’s he?”
“Jules Langley has a jewelry store in Miami Beach. A new store. He opened it a year ago.”
“Where was he before that?”
Ruyter shook his head. “I don’t know.” He gestured at the daisy pin in my hand. “I did a number of jobs for him like that one. For a couple of months. That was one of the last. Since then, nothing.”
One of the answers I’d been seeking was beginning to surface. “Got a record of the work you did for this Jules Langley?”
Ruyter nodded slowly. His eyes were anxious. “This is trouble?”
“Not for you. Let’s see those records.”
Ruyter shuffled through a doorway at the rear of his basement shop. He came back a minute later with a sheet of paper in his hand and gave it to me.
The descriptions of the jobs Ruyter had done for Langley over a three-month period read like the insurance list Ned Baum had given me over the phone.
Phony gems had been substituted in every item of jewelry owned by Kosterman’s wife and daughter.
I stopped at a drugstore in El Portal and bought what I needed to wrap the daisy pin and mail it to my lawyer, Ben Silver, with a note inside for him to hang onto it for me. Then I drove across Biscayne Bay via the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway to Miami Beach, cutting right down Collins Avenue.
Jules Langley’s jewelry store was on the fringe of hotel row, on a block of neat tourist-rich shops that shared a single pink-and-baby-blue awning running the length of the pavement. It was the height of the evening trade. Tourists strolled between the tall curb palms and the store fronts, window shopping. All the stores there were open for business, the bright lights from their show windows beckoning.
All except Jules Langley’s jewelry store. That was closed. Only a single night lamp burned inside, glinting fitfully on the merchandise in the glass showcases.
I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked loudly. No one appeared inside the empty store. I went into the flower shop next door.
The woman who greeted me as I entered wasn’t built right for her tight red slacks and peekaboo red blouse, but she acted like she thought she was.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, giving me that old Miami Beach come-on smile. “A corsage? A tropical flower plant for unfortunate friends back North?”
“Got any idea where I can find Jules Langley?”
She lost her come-on smile but remained professionally cordial. “No. I saw him leave about twenty minutes ago. I guess he decided to close up early tonight and go home.”
“Where’s his h
ome?”
“Search me.” She gave me a touch of that old smile. “We’re not that friendly.”
I went out and found a phone booth a block away, looked up Jules Langley’s residence address. It was a number out on Okeechobee Road, northwest of Miami. Getting into my Olds, I drove back across the bay.
In the northwest section of the city, near the huge junkyards and metal-product factories, Okeechobee Road joins the narrow Miami Canal that runs straight out into the spooky emptiness of the Everglades. I followed the dark road out beyond the trailer parks and cottage suburbs, out to where the first patches of the wild marshes began. The lights of the city outskirts vanished behind me. Here there were only small individual dwellings spaced far apart in the narrow strip of overgrown land between the road and the canal—ramshackle shacks alternating with neat little bungalows, each with a small boat of some kind moored behind it against the wall of the canal.
Jules Langley’s place was a solidly constructed bungalow in a small clearing on the edge of the canal. There was a little metal sign in front, facing the road, with the address on it. I cruised past slowly. The Venetian blinds were all closed, but light showed through from inside. A car was parked between the side of the bungalow and the thick tangle of bushes edging the clearing.
I kept on till the bungalow was out of sight behind me, then pulled the Olds off the road. Snapping off the headlights, I sat there in the dark for a while, listening and thinking. The only sounds came from the crickets and the bullfrogs along the canal.
There was something about the darkness, the locale, and the tension along my nervous system that reminded me unpleasantly of my wanderings through the decaying estate of Dr. Boyd, unaware of Sam trailing me. That had been the second time I’d been ambushed. The first time had been on my own boat. The trouble was that ever since Turpin’s phone call I’d been playing blindman’s buff with people who all knew the terrain better than I did. In that kind of game, ordinary caution wasn’t enough. I needed extra insurance.
I got the insurance out from under the dashboard, stripping off the adhesive tapes that had held it there. It was a tiny .22-caliber repeater automatic. Just four inches long, it looked like a toy. A deadly little toy. The self-ejecting clip held six shots. A short-range emergency weapon.
Working the slide, I pumped the top bullet into the fire chamber, snicked off the safety. I stuffed the little .22 up inside the sleeve of my jacket. It fitted snugly enough to stay there, but a sharp downward jerk of my forearm would shake it into my hand.
I got the .38 out of my belt holster and climbed out of the car. Slowly, warily, I walked back along the weed- choked shoulder of the road.
At the edge of the clearing I stopped, looked around in the moonlight. As far as I could see into the clearing between me and the canal, nothing lurked but the dark, empty night shadows. There was no sound at all from the bungalow, nothing to indicate anyone was home. But the lights still showed through the closed blinds, and the car was still parked by the side wall.
I remained perfectly still for perhaps two minutes, looking and listening. Then I drew a deep, slow breath and stepped into the clearing toward the side of the bungalow.
A voice from the bushes a little behind me to my right froze me. It was a voice I remembered—a whispering voice, taut and nervous.
“I got my sights lined up on your ear, Rome. Empty your hands and lift ‘em.”
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but my heart lurched anyway. A quiver went the length of my spine. I had to force my fingers to open, letting the .38 thud to the ground. I raised both hands head-high.
The bushes moved. I turned my head slightly to look at him as he emerged with the gun in his hand aimed at me. It was the whisperer who’d used the chloroform sponge on me. The paunchy man with the soured features and the mouth like a locked purse. He halted a safe distance from me. I couldn’t make out the expression of his eyes; in the faint moonlight they were just two small dark holes in the shadowed blur of his face. But the gun he had trained on my middle was steady enough to tell me I was going to have to be very, very careful.
Without looking away from me, he called out softly, “Okay, Oscar.”
A man rose up from behind the car. The squat, massive thug with the face that looked as if it had been flattened by the foot of an elephant. As he came around the car toward us, the moonlight glinted against the barrel of the gun he carried. And now he had a name: Oscar.
He grinned at the paunchy man and said, “I got to hand it to you, Mr. Langley. You was right all the time.”
Jules Langley nodded, not taking the dark holes of his eyes from me. “I was sort of expecting you’d show up, Rome. After Hendrik Ruyter phoned me at the store.”
Anger at Ruyter’s stupidity stirred in me. “Not very bright of him.”
“No,” Langley agreed. “Not very. He started yelping about what kind of dirty business had I handed him and how he wouldn’t cover up for me if the cops came around. Not very smart.”
“Shooting me,” I said, “wouldn’t be smart either. You both forgot to put silencers on those guns this time.”
“There’s nobody near enough to hear. But I hope it don’t come to that. It will, though, if you make a wrong move. I got something to show you in the house that’ll convince you. Let’s go.”
Oscar led the way. I followed him, and Langley trailed me. Neither of them was close enough for me to try anything, and Langley’s gun eyed the small of my back all the way. They’d done this sort of thing before.
Oscar opened the front door and we went in, Langley shutting the door behind him. They kept out of reach, one on either side of me, their eyes and guns watching me. The living room we entered was large and well furnished, but it didn’t look as if Langley had done much living in it. It had the too-neat, uncluttered appearance of a hotel suite used merely as a place to sleep in at night and leave in the morning.
“The bathroom,” Langley said. “I want you should see something.”
Oscar plodded across the deep carpet of the living room, past an open bedroom door. He opened the door to the bathroom. Then he moved aside, keeping his gun trained on me. “Have a look.”
“Keep your hands high,” Langley warned me, “while you’re looking.”
I crossed to the bathroom, with Langley following me, and looked in.
The worn bottoms of a pair of shoes stuck out at me. The shoes were attached to short legs braced stiffly against the sides of the bathtub. In the bathtub, Hendrik Ruyter lay on his back, his arms folded over his chest.
The tub was filled almost to the top. I saw Ruyter’s drowned face through the water.
“The guy fell in the canal,” snickered Oscar. “Too bad.”
“Now,” Jules Langley whispered behind me, “you know I mean business. You know how much I mean it. I got no more time to waste. Where’s the daisy pin? And where’s Nimmo and Catleg?”
CHAPTER
12
I TURNED AWAY from the bathroom. My stomach was churning slowly.
“Cute,” I mumbled thickly. “Very cute.”
“There ain’t a mark on him,” Langley said. “They’ll find him in the canal. Jumped in and drowned himself.”
“I won’t be that easy,” I told him. “You’ll have to put a bullet in me first. Maybe more than one. You’ll have problems trying to make me look like a suicide.”
“There’s a stone-crushing plant a couple miles further up the road. We stick you under a pile of stones that’s ready for the crusher in the morning. When that crusher gets through with you and that pile of stones, nobody’ll ever be able to tell you ate lead first. They won’t even be able to be sure you were ever human.”
“A little late in the game for you to get that complicated,” I said. “How come you just shot Turpin and let him lay?”
“Who’s Turpin?”
I frowned at him. Langley wasn’t lying. He had no reason to the way things were.
“The guy you shot in my office,”
I said.
Langley shrugged. “I don’t get what you’re talking about.” He glanced at his massive lieutenant. “Check him, Oscar.” I tensed as Oscar approached me. But Oscar was a professional. “Turn around,” he ordered, “and lean against the wall with your hands out.”
I did what he told me, turning and tipping my weight forward, catching myself with my palms against the wall. Oscar kept his gun well back in his right hand while his left went through my pockets. He kept to one side, careful not to get between me and Langley’s gun. Whatever I tried, a bullet from one or the other of them would get me before I could finish it.
Oscar stepped back from me when he was done. “Not in his pockets, Mr. Langley. But that don’t mean nothing. We make him strip, we can be sure.”
I pushed myself away from the wall and straightened, turning to face Langley.
He shook his head, studying me. “No. I’m not wasting any more time searching . . . Rome, last time I didn’t know for sure you had it. This time I do. And you’re gonna tell me where that pin is. And what happened to Nimmo and Catleg.”
“Who’re they?”
Oscar slammed the back of his free hand across my face. The force of it smacked me against the wall. My eyes watered from the pain where his big knuckles had struck my nose. I wiped my hand across my upper lip. It came away with a smear of blood.
“Get those hands back up!” Langley snarled.
I raised my hands above my shoulders again. “I don’t know any Nimmo. Or Catleg. What makes you think I do?”
“Nimmo was tailing you Saturday,” Langley snapped. “You knew me and Oscar. You might’ve spotted us. So Nimmo had to tail you. With Catleg for protection. That was Saturday. I ain’t heard from them since. And this is Monday night.”
“So you had a couple guys following me Saturday. This is the first I know about it. Maybe they did a runout on you.”
“Uh-uh. Not Nimmo. He’s got too big a stake in this. And Catleg’d do what Nimmo told him. Something happened to them. Must’ve. I figure you made it happen.”
I expressed part of an idea that was taking hold in me: “What kind of gun does this Nimmo carry?”
