Peter frowned. “Somewhere in that pile of cold cases, they mention a rose cut something or other, but I don’t think it was an amethyst.”
“Do you think there might be a connection?” Lia asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s all I can come up with right now,” Peter said.
“What’s the next step?” Lia asked.
“The next step is, you go back to working on your murals and try to forget about this for now,” Peter said. I’ll review my case files and see if there’s a connection.”
“I’m heading up to The Comet to talk to Mr. Cunningham,” Brent said.
“Why would you want to do that? He already said he knew nothing about it.” Lia asked.
“Sugar, not being a professional interrogator, you might not notice obvious signs of duplicity. I just want to make sure Mr. Cunningham is on the up and up.”
“I’m coming with you,” Peter said.
“As long as you remember I’m in charge,” Brent said as they walked out the door.
“Men,” Lia said to Honey, “First they can’t get enough of you. Then they’re off, chasing after some dusty old rock.”
“Like I told Lia earlier, I don’t know anything about the necklace. She’s the one who told me it belonged to Desiree.” Dave shrugged and went back to polishing a beer glass. The set of his shoulders told Peter that the bar owner was unhappy about the necklace. He wondered why.
“Is there anyone else you can think of who is likely to know where she got it?” Brent asked. Peter stood beside Brent, observing the interview.
“Desiree wasn’t the sort to get close to another woman, and I doubt she would tell a date where she got her jewelry.” Dave said.
“Why is that, do you suppose?” Brent asked.
“She wouldn’t advertise that she bought her own jewelry. At the same time, she wouldn’t say some other guy had given it to her. She’d want the guy she was with to feel like he had all of her attention, even if he knew it wasn’t true. Her habit was to be mysterious.”
“So the jewelry becomes the elephant in the bedroom, so to speak?” Brent asked.
“Something like that.”
“You think a man gave it to her?” Peter asked.
“Unless she found it in a thrift store or on eBay. Desiree made a hobby of finding vintage dish-ware and funky clothes. That necklace looked like it was outside her budget, so I don’t think that’s likely. If someone in her family had given it to her, she’d have shown it off.”
“She seeing anyone in particular, lately?” Peter asked.
Dave grunted. “She saw lots of people. I didn’t keep track.”
“If you could come up with some names, that would be very helpful,” Brent said.
“You can ask the other detectives, they have a list.”
“Just out of curiosity,” Peter said, “you encouraged Lia to keep the necklace instead of putting it in the auction. Any reason why?”
Dave shrugged again. “Why not? Lia saved Julia. She did a lot of work, rescuing Desiree’s things and making it possible for me to give Desiree a send off. Besides, have you seen her? Lia’s hot.”
Brent stepped hard on Peter’s foot. “I see your point,” he said to Dave.
Peter gritted his teeth and said nothing.
~
“I’d say the lady’s love life was a sore spot with her former boss,” Brent said as they sat in Brent’s Audi A4, comparing notes.
Peter grunted, too familiar with the feeling.
“Do you get the sense our investigation is coming uncomfortably close to Heckle and Jeckle’s turf?” Brent asked.
“Screw them. They’ve had weeks to pursue this. They latched onto the simplest solution and stuck with it, then shuffled the file to the bottom of the pile when it didn’t pan out. You have a perfectly legitimate reason for looking into Desiree.”
“Could get noisy later on,” Brent warned.
“So we’ll share. We’ll just wait a bit before we do.”
Brent dropped Peter back at Lia’s.
When she let him in, he nodded at a pillow and comforter stacked on the end of the couch.
“I guess that’s for me.”
“I’m sorry, Peter, I just can’t be with you right now. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy being with you last night, but that was sex. It didn’t change anything. You can stay, but you and I are still on hold. I don’t want to confuse all of this with my feelings for you. It’s too much right now. It would be too easy to ignore the fact that we haven’t resolved anything.”
Peter wanted to hold Lia and shake her and tell her last night was a hell of a lot more than sex, that he knew she felt it, that it had resolved a whole hell of a lot for him, that there was no way he was going to let her go now. Wisely, he thought about his childhood in the Kentucky forests, waiting patiently for small animals to lose their fear of him.
“Okay,” he compromised. “I’ll sleep out here, but if you start having bad dreams, I’m coming in.”
He camped on the couch, Viola curled on the floor next to him, his fingers buried in her fur.
27
Saturday, June 14
Peter woke to Viola nuzzling his face. Three more pairs of canine eyes stared at him from the side of the couch as if he were the source of all things wonderful. They watched as sat up and scrubbed his face with one hand, then twisted his back to pop out the kinks. I suppose now they expect me to juggle.
Peter pulled his jeans on and wandered towards the back of the apartment, lured by the sound of Lia bustling around the kitchen. The dogs followed on his heels. “Why are they following me? Did you refuse to feed them?”
“They must think you’re a soft touch,” Lia said, pouring a cup of coffee and setting a bowl on the table at his usual place. “Have you been sneaking them biscuits when I’m not looking?”
“I plead the fifth.” He let the dogs out in the back yard, then stared down into the bowl of shredded carrots. “What the heck is this?”
“This is breakfast,” Lia said, pouring him coffee, “unless you want to root out the stale Pop Tart that may be hiding in the back of my cabinets.”
Peter sat down, gamely picked up a fork and poked through the shreds. “What, exactly, is in here?”
“Carrots, apple, lemon juice, olive oil, curry . . . .”
So far, Peter thought, it didn’t sound too bad. “What are these little round things with the white tails?”
“Lentil sprouts.” She watched closely for his reaction.
“Umm . . . sounds wonderful.” He plunged his fork in, gamely reminding himself that it was food, and someone, somewhere, ate it and didn’t die. He took a mouthful. Chewed. Chewed some more. Swallowed. Took a sip of coffee.
“Well?” Lia asked.
“It tastes like carpet, wrapped in an enigma and drowned with lemon juice.”
“Give it here,” Lia sighed. “I think there’s a bagel left from yesterday.”
“Sorry, Babe. I can’t help it if I was raised on Frosted Flakes and bacon. Forgive me?”
”I’ll just wait a few years until you start feeling like crap and gaining weight. Then we’ll talk.”
Peter gratefully snagged the last blueberry bagel and popped it in the toaster. He watched with fascination as Lia consumed her bowl of carrot and lentil salad with a gusto usually reserved for triple chocolate ice cream. He wondered if she was putting on a show, just for him. No one could be that enthusiastic about lentil sprouts, could they?
She emerged from her bowl of forage. “What’s on your dance card today?”
“I’m going to hunt up that reference to a rose cut stone and see where it takes me. Brent is running Eric Flynn. You?”
“After I take the dogs out, I’m going back to the convalescent center. I haven’t made up my mind about Scholastic yet. At least I have the weekend to think about it. Are you coming back tonight?”
“That’s the plan.”
“You might as well leave Viola here,
then.”
Lia was sitting at the park with Bailey and Terry when Eric called. She scowled at the number on the screen and hit ‘reject.’ Terry raised his eyebrows at Bailey and neither commented.
“Cynth, what the hell is a spinel?” Peter and Cynth were reviewing the stack of 27 like crimes, searching for any references to a rose cut. It was after lunch when Peter finally found it.
“Beats me,” Cynth said, not looking up from the file she was scanning. “Animal vegetable or mineral?”
“Mineral. It’s jewelry. I’m assuming it’a a gem of some kind. This listing of jewelry stolen from Hatch lists a ’20 carat, oval, rose-cut spinel pendant in a gold prong setting, valued at $4,000. ’” He pulled up Google on his computer and typed “spinel” in the search bar. “‘Rarer than rubies, but often mistaken for them, undervalued despite their scarcity. . . .’ Rubies means red, so that couldn’t be Lia’s pendant.”
Cynth left her seat, read over his shoulder. One graceful but deadly hand rested lightly on his back. Cynth was inclined to casual touching. Today it was a distraction. He leaned forward, away from the contact.
“Down at the bottom,” Cynth said, pointing. “Looks like you can find spinel in any color you want. Doesn’t it list the color in the report?”
“Nope.”
“Pictures?”
Peter shuffled through the file. “Nada.”
“Do you want to see if the insurance company still has photos, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it, though I can’t see why anyone would create so much havoc over a $4,000 piece of jewelry, even with inflation.” Hopefully they would email him a jpeg and he could forward it to Lia. He set the file aside and tossed the remains of lunch - a stack of napkins, empty Wendy’s wrappers and a few cold fries mired in congealing ketchup - while Cynth stacked the rest of the files.
Peter wandered over to the soda machine to stretch his legs, bought a Pepsi to sustain him for what he expected to be a long afternoon of phone calls. As he bent down to retrieve it from the machine, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.
“Hey, Dourson, can’t you hang onto your girl? We hear Brainard got shot because someone grabbed her, right in front of you. That’s got to be pretty embarrassing, especially now that Brainard is telling everyone he figures he’s got an in with her, since he got shot on her behalf.”
“Brainard,” Peter gritted out, “got wounded because he thought being a cop would be a piece of cake after Iraq and didn’t bother to wear his vest. Lia isn’t impressed by stupidity. If she was, she’d be hanging all over you two.”
“If she doesn’t like stupid, what’s she doing with you, Dourson?”
“Speaking of stupid, did you close Willis yet?”
“Hey, Peter, what are you doing with this pair of pencil-dicks?” Cynth asked, joining the fray.
Peter snorted.
“Your mother know you talk like that?” Heckle asked.
“Who do you think taught me?” Cynth said cheerfully.
Heckle and Jeckle headed on down the hall. Peter heard one of them hiss “dyke” under his breath.
Cynth grabbed Peter’s arm. “Let it go. I hear plenty worse from the neanderthal contingency.”
By late afternoon, Peter had a jpeg featuring a purple spinel. He shot it off to Lia’s phone, then gave her a call.
“You should have called me,” Brainard told Lia from his hospital bed. “Those creeps would have never laid a hand on you if I’d been there when they showed up.”
“I’m just glad you were there. I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“You know what they say,” Brainard deepened his voice in a bad John Wayne imitation, “All in the line of duty, ma’am.” Lia mentally rolled her eyes.
A pretty young nurse bustled in, neatly stepped between Lia and Brainard. “Time for your meds, Paul.” She shot Lia an evil look while Brainard downed his pills. “How are you feeling?” she cooed. “Are you in any pain?”
“Not as long as I’m looking at you,” he said, flashing her a grin and a wink. “You’ll stop back in before your shift is over?”
“Maybe,” she said with a coy tilt of her head. She smirked at Lia and sashayed out. Lia rolled her eyes, for real this time.
“Gotta flirt with the nurses,” he explained, “if you want the good meds.”
Uh huh. “Do you know how long you’ll be here?”
“I imagine they’ll kick me loose in a day or two. I’ll be on medical leave for at least two weeks, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs.”
“I imagine you’ll think of something,” Lia said, regretting that she’d felt obligated to visit the man.
“Will you come see me?” He put on a sad-puppy face.
“I, uh, I’m really busy with a mural and a part time job right now.” Her phone beeped. She pulled up a text from Peter. She read ‘See jpeg. Is this it?’ “Wow, looks like I’m late for a meeting. I’m so glad you’re feeling better.” She started to squeeze his hand, then thought better of it. The man would mistake any compassion for attraction. She jumped up. When she was a safe distance away, she gave him a quick wave and ducked out.
Lia sat at the nearest waiting area, pulled up her email and opened the picture. There, resting on black velvet, was Desiree’s necklace. She called Peter.
“That’s it,” she told Peter. “It was stolen? Twenty years ago? How did Desiree get her hands on it?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Goodness, brother, isn’t that interesting?” Brent said when Peter tagged him with the news.
“What’s even more interesting, the lady happened to work for a jeweler.”
“Why don’t we play dumb and see what Mr. A. Vasari has to say about Desiree’s little trinket?”
Alfonso Vasari smiled when Peter and Brent entered his store. He waved them back to the counter. “Good to see you, Officer Dourson! You ready for me to make another gift for your lady?”
“Not today. We’re hoping you can help us with a little information,” Peter said.
“I understand from Lia Anderson that she showed you a necklace recently that belonged to Desiree Willis.”
“Was that her name? Nice girl, cared about Desi. You must mean the amethyst.”
“Was this it?” Peter pulled the photo of the spinel out of the inside pocket of his jacket and showed it to Vasari.
Vasari tapped the photo thoughtfully. “Could be. It was cut like this. Why are you interested in a cheap necklace?”
“How cheap was it, Mr. Vasari,” Brent asked.
Vasari stuck his lower lip out and shrugged. “Who knows? Fifty dollars? A hundred? Hard to tell without looking at it under a loupe. It’s an old cut, and the right buyer might be interested in it as an antique. Beyond that . . . .” He made a ‘pfffft’ sound.
“Did you ever see Desiree Willis wearing the necklace?” Peter asked.
Vasari shook his head. “First time I saw it, it was on your Miss Anderson.”
“We were thinking she got the necklace here,” Brent said.
“I’ve never sold anything like that here,” Vasari said.
“Where would you buy a necklace like this?” Peter asked.
“Estate sale, maybe? But Desi, she doesn’t have fifty dollars to spend on old jewelry.”
“Now where do you suppose she got it?” Brent asked.
“Pretty girl like that,” Vasari gave the two detectives a meaningful look, “where do you think she gets her jewelry? But she wouldn’t tell an old man like me about it.”
Vasari looked over Peter’s shoulder and gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. Peter turned to see a dark, curly head ducking into the back. He looked at Brent, gave a microscopic jerk of his chin. Brent gave an equally microscopic nod. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at it as if he’d received a text.
“Excuse me, Mr. Vasari, looks like I need to attend to this.”
“Who was that?” Peter asked.
“Who was who?”
/>
“The guy in the back.”
“Oh, him. That’s my son, Lonzo. He comes around sometimes to beg money. He says borrow. But borrow means he pays it back, no? Why do you want to know about Desi’s pendant?”
“Someone went to a great deal of trouble to steal it recently. We’re wondering why.”
Vasari’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Desi’s necklace? It was pretty, but not worth much. You sure they were after it?”
“It’s all they took,” Peter said.
Vasari frowned at this.
Brent returned through the back of the store, escorting the sullen young man Peter had seen. “I thought we should have a little chat with Lonzo. You don’t mind, do you Mr. Vasari?”
“We help any way we can, don’t we, Lonzo?” Vasari said.
Brent jerked his head, urging Peter closer. Then Brent took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. Peter got the hint. He leaned and smelled the faint aroma of pepper spray mixed with the sweat on Lonzo’s skin.
“Lonzo, where were you, night before last?” Peter asked.
“Playing Assassin’s Creed with my cousin, Fredo. Why do you want to know?”
“Will he back that up?” Peter asked.
“Sure, why not? You want his number?”
“Do you know where we can find him now?” Brent asked.
“Sure, he’s at work.”
Brent took this information down, then stepped aside to make a private call. When he was done, he nodded to Peter.
“Gentlemen, I think it would be beneficial to continue our conversation with young Mr. Vasari at the station.”
Lonzo’s eyes widened in horror before he could school his face. Then his expression toughened, his eyes shuttered. His father frowned and nodded to him.
“You go. I’ll send Vincent.”
“Who is Vincent?” Brent asked.
“My brother, the attorney.”
Peter stood next to Brent in the little room behind the one way mirror in the interrogation room while the punk who kidnapped Lia consulted with Vincent Vasari, the family lawyer. Vincent Vasari was a criminal attorney with an oily manner that had always gotten under Peter’s skin.
Sneak Thief (A Dog Park Mystery) Page 22
