"Do we know if Basil survived the Holocaust?"
"Michael, we do not. We know the Nazis searched for him. Oh, yes, how they searched. But they were dealing with a person who had spent a lifetime in subterfuge, and was an expert at hiding and escaping or whatever was necessary to stay alive ... and he and his pouch of fabulous uncut stones never surfaced." His eyes burned into mine. "Until now, Michael."
"You seem pretty damn sure of what you're saying, David."
He nodded sagely.
"Why are you sure?"
His fingers turned the stone until I was looking at the window carved into its surface. David held the loupe out to me. I put it to my eye and drew the stone up to it. I could see, but I couldn't put it together.
I handed the loupe back, shrugged, and he said, "There are facets that are the trademark of Basil."
"Why isn't it eroded too?"
David smiled. "That is a ... shall I say, concave cut? This you understand?"
"The surfaces of the other stones couldn't touch it?"
"That is right."
"Why cut the window at all?"
"Basil never displayed a finished work. It was ordered, paid for, then delivered. Now—what layman knows from an uncut stone? Not many. To show them what is this pebblelike thing, from which will emerge an art object of untold beauty and value, he would open up a small part of it. And even doing that he left his trademark. Yes, the mark of Basil—it was always there."
"You've seen it before?"
"No. Only fine drawings made by a master craftsman who had indeed known Basil. He was no legend, Michael—he was a man. Remarkable men do walk this earth from time to time. I would say, with no intention of embarrassing you, that you are such a man."
"I can cut a throat, David, but not a diamond."
"You are indeed a diamond in the rough, Michael." He shifted in his chair. "Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to be able to study two of Basil's early pieces. Remarkable. There is nothing done like that today."
"You think Basil's dead?"
"Wouldn't he have to be?" the old man asked. "Who lives that long? Even men who become legends die. This is something you might keep in mind, Michael, the next time a burst of recklessness comes upon you."
I put the stone back in my pocket. "Thanks, David. This is helpful."
"It is unless I have just been making all of this up. Just an old windbag trying to impress his young friend."
"Not you, buddy."
"Michael..."
"What?"
"This is trouble. Big trouble. Trouble as big as man's greed. You do know that?"
"David, that I really know. That I can give you an expert opinion on."
"Someday ... you will tell me more?"
"Sure."
"And if you should wish to put this pebble on the market, will you remember your old friend?"
"Of course. Maybe we can get rich and retire to Florida together."
He waved the offer away. "You may have retirement, my friend. I prefer to live."
As I wandered through the many deals being made on that singular street, I could only think how amazed each of these merchants would be if they knew about the rough pebble in my pocket with its window into untold wealth.
It had fallen out of her sleeve cuff.
Things don't fall into a place like that, so it had to have been put there. And the only people who put things in the cuffs of sleeves are those who wear them.
And now the big question... why?
David Gross may have put his finger on it when he asked me where the rest of the stones were. Suppose the dead girl did have a pouch of them? Why would she extract one, and one with a window in it?
Come on, I told myself, it isn't that hard.
Virginia Mathes was no heist artist. She wasn't into any part of that game at all. Somebody had used her as a patsy, dropped a fortune in uncut diamonds on her with a story to go with it, and she'd bought the lie.
She was a suddenly recruited carrier, told just to follow instructions, but curiosity had compelled a look at what she was carrying. Not being a lapidary, she couldn't tell one pebble from another, but picked one as a sample, the one with the shiny window—maybe to take to a jeweler herself to find out what this was all about.
Or maybe whoever she was working with only sent her out with one stone—maybe that missing purse hadn't held a pouch of diamonds, and her cuff had been home to a sample to prove to some buyer that the precious things existed and were in her controller's possession.
Still, either way—why walk down a damn dangerous street? She'd have been better off one street over, where it was still hopping and other people were around. Or maybe she thought she could avoid being followed by cutting over onto some out-of-the-way route. A normal person in her position would have been jumpy—checking behind her would have been automatic.
But she hadn't been jumpy, or a guy in sneakers couldn't have sneaked up behind her.
Or had she been jumpy?
And a mugger hugging the shadows let her go by, then went at her when she passed. He could have had the knife out as a threatening gesture, but the victim was so on edge that her frightened turn, and readied scream, were so instantaneous the guy just stuck the knife in her, ripped it out, cut her purse straps, and took off with the bag.
But the purse wouldn't have held the rest of the pebbles if she'd brought only a hidden sample with her. And a mugger wouldn't think to go check out her apartment looking for stones he hadn't known existed. He might go there to make a simple heist, only Ginnie's pad had been searched, not stripped.
Somebody else went through her apartment. Looking for the rest of the stones? And found them, maybe?
If a mugger had been the fly in this ointment, he was out of it now—he had his thirty-five bucks plus tips and that was all. Muggers don't hold on to wallets or purses very long. They empty them out, grab the cash, and dump them. Credit cards and checks can be chancy, but everybody takes cash.
Ginnie had been a messenger, a go-between in over her head. Somebody had sent her to show somebody else one of the stones—that had to be it.
It felt like someone had either heisted the stones or stumbled onto them somehow, and was either in the market to sell them to a buyer or back to the owner.
I knew I should turn the pebble over to Pat Chambers and share all of these thoughts with him. I was in no position to do the kind of in-depth investigation it would take to follow all these threads. Pat had an army, and I didn't even have an office.
Or a secretary who happened also to be a P.I. herself, and who could have helped me figure this damn thing out.
So why wasn't I going to Pat?
Because this little kill, which had turned out to be about very big money, had taken place within a few blocks of the mortuary where Bill Doolan had been sent off. What I had blithely written off as coincidence was feeling more and more like something significant, something I didn't understand yet.
But if whoever killed Bill Doolan was also responsible for Ginnie Mathes's murder, only one person was going to settle both scores.
And it wasn't Pat Chambers.
It had gotten dark faster than I expected. There was none of the quiet ease of evening, the way it was at my Florida place, no soft smells and faraway sounds. It was all New York hardness, and the sounds were brazen with impatience, the odors sharp, pungent. Sidewalk traffic had the same hostility the roadway had, everybody in a damned hurry and coming straight at you. Some of the younger wiseass punks even played the chicken game but when they got up close and saw my face, they didn't do any shoulder jousting.
Damn, had it always been like this? What had happened in the one year I had been away?
When I reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, I stopped and stared around me. I had been walking for a good half hour without realizing it, letting the city get back into my pores again. Now I was hoping the place wasn't going to poison me. If I had been thinking, I couldn't remember what i
t was about.
The girl said, "Were you looking for someone?"
She was still pretty, like a college postgrad, with a pert smile, brown hair highlighted blonde, and a cute shape in a floral-print minidress. There was even a quizzical expression in her eyes as if she really meant what she said.
But the dress was too short and too tight and her makeup was heavier than back when she was trying to date guys her own age in Bumfuck, Utah, or Arsehole, West Virginia. Before she became a runaway. And a hooker.
A year ago she never would have come near me.
I had paused, so she repeated, "I said, are you looking for someone?"
"Why?"
"You look lost."
I smiled a little. "Maybe I am."
"Then..." A smile flashed, and life pretended to come into dark blue eyes. "... I may be the one you're looking for." She moved, a silken little gesture, and her eyes locked on mine. The headlights of a car turning the corner swept over her face and the little-girl look went hard for a moment.
"You have supper yet?" I asked her.
"What?" She seemed surprised, then: "No."
"Good. Let's get some. And you'll get paid for your time. Is it still a dollar a minute?"
She smirked but it was friendly. "Mister, are you out of touch..."
"Okay, I'll settle for the going rate."
Her head cocked, like the RCA Victor dog. "You're not kidding about supper, are you?"
"No, I'm hungry, and I want to talk."
I picked out the place, since if she'd chosen it, I might still wind up sapped by her boyfriend for my wallet. It was a small Italian restaurant east of Sixth Avenue and she had veal Parmesan and I had sausage and peppers, and for an hour I talked about New York and Velda, and she told me all about three abortions, a bad marriage, and I don't think either of us always knew exactly what the other was saying, the Generation Gap being what it is.
But somehow we both enjoyed the talk.
Going out the door into the evening, she asked, "Are you a tourist?"
"Sort of. I used to live here."
I slipped her two hundred bucks that she didn't want to take until I stuck it in her purse.
On the way out, she said, "I never did that before."
"Now that you mention it, neither have I." I glanced at my watch. "Are you done for the night or are you going back to your corner?"
She threw me a quick, impish grin. "I think I'll go home. Why spoil a nice evening. Listen, I could still go somewhere with you—no charge. I like you. I can make you happy."
"You could make me ecstatic, kitten."
She laughed. "'Kitten'—that's a funny thing to call a person. How about it?"
I thought about that double bed back at the Commodore, but I said, "Another time."
"Sure." There was something sad in it, which from a realist like this kid was remarkable. "You could walk me back to Fifth. I'll get a cab there."
"Pleasure."
She hooked her arm in mine and we headed east. Halfway up the street, we were crossing over so she could pick up a cab by the stoplight, and we almost made it.
Neither of us saw the car coming. There was no warning blast of a horn or flash of lights, just the roar of an accelerating engine that was right behind us and I heard the dull, sickening sound of the car smashing into a body just as the edge of the fender caught me under my thigh and spun me toward the sidewalk.
For a minute I lay there, dazed, waiting for the sudden flood of pain to come on, trying to figure out what the hell had happened. I moved, sat up, and knew that nothing was broken. The breath was still out of me and inside of me I could feel that everything was still in place.
Up ahead, people were milling about and somebody was screaming hysterically. The crowd seemed to flow in as though drawn by a magnet and blue lights were making psychedelic patterns on the walls of the buildings.
Then the disorientation passed and I remembered the car. Remembered getting the sense of a car, its engine roar and the flash of metal and headlights passing as we'd been struck.
But no recall, no sense, of the vehicle's make or color much less a goddamn license plate. Only that it had been big, a Caddy or Lincoln maybe. Or maybe any car that knocks you on your ass seems big in your fragmented memory....
My hat was lying right beside me and so was her purse. Swearing under my breath, I picked them both up and walked unsteadily toward the crowd. They were three thick, but I edged my way through as a lady in front got sick to her stomach, grabbed at her mouth, and forced herself away.
What was there was enough to make anybody sick. The impact had crushed my dining companion's body into odd angles and the force of her head hitting the pavement left nothing recognizable. She didn't look young and she didn't look old.
She just looked dead.
I realized I had her purse in my hand, then edged back out of the crowd. I had seen enough. A uniformed officer was standing beside a prowl car and I eased over to him.
"This was lying in the street back there," I said. I handed him the pocketbook.
He looked at me sharply. "You see the accident?"
I told him the truth. "No, I sure didn't."
Being in the accident didn't mean I had to see it.
"You open this purse?"
"No, but maybe you'd better. Some legalities involved, aren't there?"
That got me a frosty look, then he said, "I'll go get the sergeant."
I didn't wait for him to come back.
Two blocks away I looked down at myself. There was a small tear in my pants leg and street dirt on the sleeve of my coat. With all that jostling, I checked to see if the pebble was still in my pocket.
It was.
My hat needed straightening out, but I wouldn't have been taken for an accident victim, not as long as I was up and walking. Not that that mattered—a guy unconscious on the sidewalk would just be a drunk to anyone running where the action was. If there was no blood, there was no hurt, so who needed to stop, in this town?
My side was hurting again, a dull ache that had all the promise of building into a boiling agony if I didn't get back to my medication fast.
But first I had to make sure of something. I found where the car had made the initial contact and I kept on walking. About two hundred feet down, I found the skid marks that curved out from the curb where the driver burned rubber pulling away. Any squeal noise he made would have been buried in the traffic clatter from Sixth Avenue.
It had to be a big car with a big engine that could pick up momentum fast, but the driver was lousy and never took his foot off the pedal long enough to counteract the centrifugal force of the curve.
He had wanted me, but all he got was her.
And I didn't even know her name.
I got up at six-thirty, showered, brushed my teeth, and shaved. I began to come alive when room service got there with my coffee and the News. "I have the Times if you'd like, sir..."
"News is fine," I said.
I signed the bill, fixed my coffee, and opened the paper.
In the photo her body was covered on the stretcher but I wasn't interested in that. The story was brief because she was a nobody who had gotten splattered publicly, a twenty-nine-year-old named Dulcie Thorpe who lived alone in a small East Side apartment. She apparently maintained a nice lifestyle with no visible means of support, no family, and apparently few friends. Her purse had been recovered and had contained a little over six hundred dollars in cash.
So there were still honest cops in New York.
It was strictly a hit-and-run accident and from the damage it did, the car must have been well above the speed limit. No one saw the accident, although several saw a car race by, turn against the light of Fifth, and fly away. One said a headlight was out.
Pat was in when I called, told somebody in his office to close the door, and said, "Well, how are things going, pal?"
"Could be better."
"Yeah?"
"Last night there was a hit-an
d-run on Forty-seventh right off Fifth."
"Right, a young girl."
"Since when do hit-and-runs hit your desk?"
"It's in the papers this morning. Why?"
"They locate the car, Pat?"
"Beats me."
"Think you can find out?"
"Why?"
"This is where I remind you I'm a taxpayer, and you tell me to go fuck myself and do what I ask anyway."
I heard him breathing hard, then, irritably, he said, "Hang on," and put me on hold.
My coffee was gone and I had finished the paper when he came back on. "Mike...?"
"I'm here."
"It was four blocks away, double-parked outside a bar. The lights and grille were smashed, blood, pieces of flesh, and bits of clothing were in the wreckage. A cabbie parked down the street saw it pull in, a man get out and apparently walk toward the bar. That was all. It was a stolen late-model Caddy and the driver probably wore gloves."
"When was it reported stolen?"
"At eleven P.M. when the police tow-away truck saw what had happened to the front end. They pulled the owner's name from the computer and got him out of bed."
"Who was he?"
"A young doctor who had spent the whole day in surgery at Bellevue."
"And no prints," I said.
"Actually, plenty of 'em, but they all belong to two people—the doctor and his wife." He paused, then added, "It was a real pro job—the entry, hot-wiring, the whole bit. Does this have something to do with you, Mike?"
I let out a little laugh. I could feel Pat stiffen on the other end of the line. My voice sounded strained when I said, "How long have I been back, Pat?"
"Two days."
"Two D.O.A.s."
"Okay, Mike, say it."
"That guy in the car was trying to take me out. He got the girl instead."
"You're not in the report," he said quietly.
"Right, and there's no sense getting me in it either." I took a deep breath, sat in a different position, and told Pat how it had gone down.
When he had mulled it over, he said, "How do you see it?"
"Somebody doesn't appreciate me snooping around. Whether it's Doolan or the Mathes girl that has made me popular, I can't say yet."
Kiss Her Goodbye Page 9
