Mr. Blackmore’s eyes narrowed appraisingly as he said, “My grandson can handle everything. I’ll be glad to help in any way I can. Please come into my office.”
“I wondered if that’s who he was,” I said.
“I look forward to introducing you when we’re not quite so busy,” he said, smiling, as he led us past glass cabinets filled with glittering gems.
As we passed his grandson, he pointed to the rear, and the younger man nodded. Mr. Blackmore led us into a large office and stood behind his oversized mahogany desk until we were seated. He waited for one of us to speak.
“I asked Josie to accompany me because an antique is involved in an investigation we’re working on,” Ellis said. Ellis glanced at me as he spoke, and soon I felt Mr. Blackmore’s eyes on me, too. “Please, Josie, would you explain?”
I took the satin case containing the pearl rosette button Hank had found out of my tote bag, shook the button into my hand, and laid it on the old-fashioned desk blotter, the kind with triangular green leather corners and a replaceable pad.
“Am I right that you’ve been asked to replicate this?” I asked.
He gazed at the button, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
“May I?” he asked.
“Please,” I replied, as charmed as ever by his courtly diction and demeanor.
He picked up the button, then switched on his desk lamp and studied both sides in the circle of strong white light, using a loupe. When he was finished, he slid the button toward me, turned off the lamp, and leaned back in his chair.
“Why are you asking?” he asked Ellis.
Ellis paused, perhaps deciding how much to reveal. “I’m hoping you’ll keep what I’m about to tell you confidential.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Blackmore said without hesitation.
“That button was found at a murder site. I think the killer knows she lost it and is trying to get it replaced before she has to explain why it’s no longer in her possession.”
Mr. Blackmore glanced me for a moment, then turned back to Ellis. “Is this related to the murder of Riley Jordan?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ellis replied.
He looked at the button for a moment. “A woman named Nancy Patterson came in last Thursday and asked me to fabricate a button.” He pointed. “This button. She had photographs.”
“You took the job?” Ellis asked as I returned the button to the satchel.
“That’s right. I told her we could do the job, including the engraving.”
“Did she tell you why she needed the replacement?” Ellis asked.
Mr. Blackmore nodded. “Yes. She said it was a family treasure, and that her mother would kill her if she ever found out that she lost it.”
Chief Hunter rubbed the side of his nose, thinking, the same move he’d done earlier in my office. “That sounds like a young woman.”
“Yes … relatively young, I think.”
I took his assessment with a grain of salt—to a man in his midseventies, like Mr. Blackmore, a thirty-five-year-old woman like Becka or Kenna would look young.
“What does she look like?” Ellis asked.
“She had dark brown hair. I don’t know about her eyes—I never saw them. She wore a pink sweater, blue jeans, big sunglasses, and a floppy hat. The hat was made of straw with a big brim and a kind of fringe around the edge, the kind you buy at the beach.”
Ellis glanced around. “What about video? You’ve got to have security here.”
Mr. Blackmore shook his head. “My system is old—the tape is on a seventy-two-hour loop. The images from Thursday were wiped out yesterday.” He looked embarrassed. “My security company has been after me for years to go digital.”
Ellis leaned back and crossed his legs. “This question may sound odd, but how sure are you she was a woman? Could she have been a man playing a woman?”
Mr. Blackmore looked startled. “Oh, no! I’m quite certain. I mean, there was no question at all in my mind.”
“Was she big, you know, big-boned?” Ellis asked.
“No, she was rather thin.”
“How tall was she?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember, which means her height must have been somewhere in the normal range or I would have noticed.”
“What about her features? Was there anything remarkable about her nose, for instance?”
“No.”
“Her mouth?”
Mr. Blackmore pursed his lips, thinking, then shook his head. “No,” he said.
“What color was her skin?”
“White.”
“Fair or dark?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
“How about any tattoos?”
“No.”
“Scars or birthmarks?”
“No.”
Ellis crossed his ankles and stared at his toes for a moment, then asked, “When did you tell her the new button would be ready?”
“A week, maybe longer.”
“Did she leave her phone number?”
“No. She said she would be traveling out of the country and that she’d call me.”
Ellis nodded again. “You mentioned photos the woman brought in—do you still have them?”
“Yes, they’re attached to the work order.” Mr. Blackmore rolled his chair back and stood up. “I’ll get them for you.”
“Let me,” Ellis said, standing quickly. He pulled a latex glove from his side pocket and got an evidence bag from inside his jacket. He smiled. “Just in case there’s any forensic evidence.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Blackmore said, swallowing hard.
Mr. Blackmore walked to a chest-high oak cabinet, the kind with dozens of file drawers used by libraries before computers. Whenever we could get our hands on some of the single- or two-drawer units, we marketed them as recipe boxes. In good condition, they flew out the tag sale door at fifty dollars and up. Mr. Blackmore pointed to a drawer on the left. Ellis pulled it out and placed it on Mr. Blackmore’s desk. Mr. Blackmore stared down for a moment, then pointed.
“That’s it,” he said. “The thick packet in the middle there.”
Ellis reached in with his gloved hand and eased the stapled documents out. “Why is it so bulky?” he asked.
“I stapled the photographs to the work order, and the receipt. If I recall correctly, Ms. Patterson paid a thousand dollars as a deposit. We always require a deposit on custom work, and this is an expensive project, what with the matched pearls and platinum.”
“Did she charge it?”
Mr. Blackmore shook his head. “No. She paid cash. I remember because she had an envelope in her purse filled with hundred-dollar bills.”
“A bank envelope?” Ellis asked.
“No, a plain white, standard number ten envelope. There was no writing on it.”
“Do you recall if she touched anything that might not have been cleaned? I’m wondering if we might be able to get some fingerprints. Maybe she dropped her purse, for example, and when she bent down to pick it up, she grabbed a display cabinet leg to steady herself.”
Mr. Blackmore shook his head slowly for a moment. “No. I don’t remember anything like that.”
The two men sat down again. Ellis placed the papers on the desk and used a pen to flip through until he came to the photographs.
“Josie,” he asked, “do you recognize these photos?”
“Yes,” I replied. “From the background, I can tell they’re from EZK’s Web site.” I pointed. “Do you see the shadows in the white satin?”
Ellis nodded, slipped the packet into his plastic evidence bag, then took off the plastic glove and tossed it into a trash can. “Tell me about the incident from the beginning,” he said to Mr. Blackmore. “Did Ms. Patterson call and make an appointment, or did she just show up?”
“She just showed up.”
“Isn’t that unusual? A young woman walks in out of the blue to order an expensive button? Wouldn’t that raise a red
flag?”
“Not at all, and frankly, I’m not sure I understand your point. People buy expensive items all the time. Why should it raise a red flag?”
Ellis nodded. “Fair enough. Was there anything about her story or her manner that made you think she wasn’t telling the truth?”
“No, not at all.” Mr. Blackmore turned to me. “You know what’s it like, Josie, when customers come in for the first time. You listen more than you talk as you try to discover if there are any hidden agendas you need to know about in order to close the sale. Do they really want a birthday gift that thrills Mom like they say they do, or do they want a gift that puts their brother to shame?”
“I know just what you mean,” I said. I turned to Ellis. “It’s not our place to question people’s motives.”
Mr. Blackmore nodded. “Exactly. I had no reason to doubt Ms. Patterson’s story. I still don’t.”
Ellis nodded. “Then what happened?”
Mr. Blackmore shrugged. “Nothing. She was in here less than ten or fifteen minutes. She told me what she wanted, and I told her I could do it, but that I couldn’t price it until I acquired the pearls, although at a minimum, it would be three thousand dollars. She didn’t seem concerned with price. She was concerned with speed.”
“You haven’t heard from her since?”
“No, but she said she’d call early this week just to touch base, to be sure everything was progressing properly.”
Ellis tapped a short trill on his chair arm. “I’m going to ask you to come to the station house. I’d like a detective to take you through your interaction with Ms. Patterson again, and I’d like for you to sit with a police artist to see if we can come up with a sketch of what she looks like.”
I sat and listened as Mr. Blackmore asked logistical questions—when, how long, where, and the like.
“One more thing,” Ellis said as we stood. “I’d like your permission to tap your phone so we can have her voice on file.”
“I have no problem with that.”
Ellis smiled. “I wish all citizens were as cooperative as you.”
“I should have said that I’d have no problem with it so long as you don’t share any information with my competitors,” he added, smiling and shooting me a glance. “Like Josie.”
“Guaranteed.”
“I’m not competition! I don’t deal in jewelry.”
“Still,” Mr. Blackmore said.
“No problem,” Ellis interjected. “I’ll ask the district attorney’s office to draft an agreement containing that language.”
We walked to the door.
“There’s one more thing,” Ellis said, pausing. “If and when Ms. Patterson calls, it’s crucial that you act naturally, that you don’t spook her in any way.”
“I can do that,” Mr. Blackmore said with conviction. “I’m quite experienced at staying on point.”
“Are you sure? It’s one of those things that’s easier said than done.”
“Chief Hunter,” Mr. Blackmore said, a look of cynical amusement on his face, “over the years I’ve spoken to men’s mistresses as well as their wives, and women’s lovers as well as their husbands, and I’ve never yet mixed one up. There’s no question in my mind that when Ms. Patterson calls, she will have no idea that I’ll have grabbed my cell phone to text you about the call.”
I grinned at the thought of old-world, proper Morton Blackmore texting.
He noticed my expression. “I tweet, too.”
I started laughing. “Maybe you can teach me,” I said.
He smiled. “Perhaps we can reach some accommodation. I’ll help you develop a social media marketing plan if I can become Prescott’s outsourced jewelry expert.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said. Up until now, I’d saved up jewelry that came our way and sold it to trusted experts during my occasional trips to New York. Using Blackmore’s would save me the trouble of carting priceless gems to the city, and it would speed up cash flow. “I should have thought of it myself. Consider it done.”
He smiled and offered me his hand for a shake. “Thank you, Josie. I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, Mr. Blackmore.”
“My grandson is very talented, too. So your appraisals will be in good hands going forward.”
“I look forward to working with you both—although I’ll have you work with my administrative manager, Gretchen Brock, on the Twitter thing. My brain is full.”
* * *
Halfway back to my office, I turned to Ellis and said, “I think we should still check the mall jewelry stores.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because while you and Mr. Blackmore were discussing his visit to the police station, I got to thinking. You know how I said Nancy Patterson might have asked about getting the button replaced at one of those stores in the mall, but for sure she ended up at Blackmore’s?”
“Yes. You were right.”
I grinned. “True, but jewelry stores in major shopping malls don’t use old-fashioned security cameras.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ellis punched a button on his dashboard radio unit and stated his name. All I heard was a weird kind of crackling noise, yet from his back-and-forth conversation, I gathered that to him, the staticky-sounding noises were actually words. After a moment, he issued a series of instructions. Police officers were to immediately and simultaneously visit every jewelry store on the coast looking for evidence that a dark-haired, youngish woman wearing a pink sweater, big sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed, floppy straw hat had been there last Thursday. They were to start with Korley’s and Zello’s. If they got any sightings they were to call him immediately.
I got back to my office just before two. The first thing I did was call Wes.
“I have news,” I said.
“About the police deployment?” he asked.
“What deployment?”
“To shopping malls. Do you know what’s happening?”
Wes and his police scanner, I thought.
“You’ve got to promise not to publish anything yet. The police have a solid lead, and I can tell you about it, but we can’t risk driving the suspect underground.”
“Gotcha. Done.”
“Okay, then, here goes. A woman—” I broke off and corrected myself. I wanted to be precise and accurate. “Someone—probably a woman—ordered a replacement button from Blackmore’s Jewelers. Have you heard about the button?”
“No—what button?”
I was surprised that Wes’s police source hadn’t leaked information about the button, then realized that probably his source hadn’t considered it significant. After all, until we’d confirmed that a replacement order had, in fact, been placed, it had been pure speculation that the button had been lost by Riley’s killer.
I filled Wes in, and as I spoke, I could hear him scribbling. I told him about how Hank had fetched the button, the police’s unsuccessful forensic examination, the duplicate button on the gray Claire McCardell coat, the connection to the sorority, my calls to the sorority and Mr. Lossoff, what Margo and Tony had told me about the supposed Riley Jordan and Nancy Patterson, and Nancy Patterson’s visit to Blackmore’s.
“This is great stuff, Josie! Real juice! So how does this relate to the police fanning out at shopping malls?”
“Blackmore’s has an old security system, you know, the kind using actual tape. Her image has been recorded over. I had the thought that maybe the woman, whoever she is, tried a mall jeweler first. Chain stores probably wouldn’t take on a project like this—but unless she’s an expert, she would have no reason to know that. If she did go to a mall shop, someone might have suggested Blackmore’s. Those jewelry stores have up-to-date digital security cameras, which means if she went there, they probably still have her photograph, so we can see what she looks like.”
“Wicked good deal, Josie! You ate your Wheaties today, huh? How did Mr. Blackmore describe her?”
I smiled at Wes’s compliment, t
hen repeated everything Mr. Blackmore had told us. I crossed my fingers. “I know you stay close to your scanner, Wes. Will you let me know the minute the woman calling herself Nancy Patterson calls Mr. Blackmore?”
“Get me a photo of the button and you got a deal.”
I agreed to do so right away, and as we hung up, I thought to myself, Wes isn’t the only one with sources. I’d just arranged to receive an early alert if and when Nancy Patterson got in touch with Mr. Blackmore.
* * *
I called Bobby.
“I think the police have asked you about the coat we found in the attic, right?” I asked. “The gray Claire McCardell?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t tell them anything about it—except that Riley wore it a couple of times years ago.”
“Why did she stop wearing it, do you know?”
He didn’t reply. I could hear him breathing.
“Bobby?” I asked softly.
“She’d hate for me to tell you,” he said, his tone matching mine.
I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be confidential about a coat.
He sighed, then added, “Maybe some secrets shouldn’t survive the grave. It’s not like it’s any big deal. I mean, it was a huge deal to Riley, but it wasn’t to anyone else.”
He paused again, and again I waited. I tried to think of something to say or a question I could ask that might nudge him along, but before I could formulate one, he spoke.
“The coat didn’t fit her anymore. It’s a size two, right? After we got married, Riley gained some weight. At first she just grumped about it a little, then when she couldn’t lose it, she got realistic, saying she wasn’t a teenager anymore, and wearing a size four was still pretty darn good. To tell you the truth, Josie, I was proud of how she handled her disappointment. I mean, she went from flipping out to philosophical.”
He paused, sighing again, and I felt bad for him. Recalling so intimate a conversation must have been difficult. A measure of love, I thought, is secrets kept.
“In the last year or so,” he continued, “she’d gained even more weight. She went from a four to a six, and between you and me, she was not coping well. I didn’t notice any change in her body and told her so, but she couldn’t hear it. I mean, Jesus, Josie, even if she had gained enough weight that I would have noticed, I truly didn’t care—but she did. She told me that she felt fat and out of control. It got to the point where she really seemed to hate herself.”
Deadly Threads Page 18
