The Case of the Yellow Diamond

by Carl Brookins

  I checked my notes and couldn’t find any reference to children. I searched further and discovered a death certificate for a girl child of three years with the same name and address. Cause of death was not indicated. That was unusual, but clerical errors did happen, and it didn’t seem to be relevant. Again, a message appeared suggesting more information was available if only I’d pony up some more money. Again, I declined.

  I traveled elsewhere along the humming wires and silicone and satellite connections until I discovered Terrance Martin had borrowed heavily to finance the establishment of his cleaning chain. What’s more, the loans had been privately placed, meaning no bank was involved. That was a wall that could be breached, but did I need to make the effort?

  I decided to leave that for another time. It was getting late. I had a small nightcap of some mighty fine Cointreau and went to bed.

  * * * *

  In the morning I called Mrs. Pryor to thank her for her help and briefly explained I had been successful in covering up the true source of the money. I don’t usually keep clients up to the minute on my investigations, but this was a special sort of situation. Besides, she wasn’t really a client, although I assured her I’d tell her the outcome whenever the case was finally resolved.

  Catherine would be back this evening, I was happy to remind myself. When the phone rang, I answered it instead of letting it roll over to the answering machine. It was the Winona cop who had the Stan Lewis homicide.

  “I just thought you’d want to know, the ME has wrapped up his examination, and we’re gonna bury Mr. Lewis this afternoon in the local cemetery.”

  He’s a vet, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, and his remains will be moved to a federal site after they get through with the paperwork.”

  “I’ll drive down,” I said. He gave me the time of the ceremony and directions to the city cemetery.

  Several hours later, I stood beside a large man in the dress uniform of a captain in the Winona Police Department on a still, sun-swept slope in one corner of a Winona cemetery. Across the freshly dug grave at rigid attention ranged a four-person honor guard of veterans. They stood holding flags that drooped in the heat and absence of moving air. I was sweating, even though I wasn’t exerting myself in the slightest. A minister of some denomination in a black suit with a high white collar stood at one end of the casket. There was no one else there to see this veteran of that enormous conflict called World War Two placed in a temporary grave. Stan Lewis, Air Force gunner, late of St. Louis, Missouri, served his country honorably and then lived an apparently quiet life thereafter for more than sixty years. He died violently in a town he probably had never heard of, on a train beside the water of a river that flowed all the way to his hometown.

  I decided that, even though I didn’t know the man, he ought to have some justice in this world, and it looked like it was up to me to find it for him. He probably wouldn’t thank me for the trouble I’d take, but there you go. We do or don’t do things for many different reasons, some of which make little or no sense to others. I didn’t care.

  I was going to find whoever it was who fired the bullet into Stan Lewis and then dumped his body on the train tracks in Winona.

  * * * *

  It was late when I got home, after stopping at my office to check the mail and messages. That didn’t take long. There was only one recorded message and the mail was all crap. I thought about the message—from a lawyer I knew only slightly. I might not even recognize him if we chanced to meet on the street. He was a junior associate in a very large law firm for which I did some work a few years ago. He’d been designated as my contact at the firm. I had led him to believe he could be helpful in future work if he kept in touch.

  So, he started calling me occasionally. Meaning maybe every couple of months. I had originally expected I’d have more frequent additional assignments from the firm, but it hadn’t worked out, so there was not much he could provide. But he called anyway. And now this.

  I almost didn’t recognize his voice on the tape. He didn’t leave his name but did leave enough information so I figured it out. What he told me was that word was going around I was becoming unreliable as an investigator. He didn’t tell me the source, but I figured it out for myself. Attorney at Law Gareth Anderson was starting to turn the thumbscrews. He wanted me gone from the Bartelmes’ problem in the worst way, and he wasn’t above trying to mess with my rep and thus my business.

  Pissing me off could be a dangerous pastime. For one thing, I was good at what I did and most attorneys in the Cities who knew about me were aware of my record. So his effort to dirty me probably wouldn’t do much damage unless I let it go on for a while. Second, Lawyer Anderson’s efforts made me wonder about him. Maybe he had something to hide. I would make it my business to find that out.

  Chapter 23

  Finding some dirt about Attorney Anderson took less time and effort than I expected. For one thing, I was good at my job. Did I mention that? Being good at my job meant I had a steady traffic in cases of various kinds and so had a number of contacts in multiple levels of society. Some were not individuals you’d want to meet in a dark alley off Hennepin Avenue, even if the city has reconstituted a formerly seedy block.

  First I made a few calls to learn a little more about Lawyer Anderson and his friends. I found out where he lived—in a nice medium-sized mansion just off Lake of the Isles. Actually, it wasn’t far from Catherine’s and my place. Then I sent one of my construction pals around. He backed his big dump truck up over the curb onto the Anderson’s soft boulevard lawn, making a few ruts in the lawn. When he went to the door he sort of leaned on Mrs. Anderson, not physically, you understand, but pushing the misunderstanding. Turned out to be the wrong address. I was never sure whether she had the presence of mind to take the truck’s license number, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The truck was being moved to Wisconsin, and the license plate was seriously covered with muddy tape. The truck left the scene, but the ruts remained.

  The next morning, Anderson’s secretary reported she’d received a vaguely menacing phone call before he got to the office. That same morning, somebody had banged a vehicle into their trash receptacle before the company truck had arrived. The Andersons’ front lawn was quite a mess.

  Later in the day, Anderson himself got a call at his office and heard only some heavy breathing. It went on long enough Anderson got rattled and hung up the phone with a bang in my ear. When he left the office that day, he was probably startled, driving out of the underground parking ramp, to encounter me just standing there beside the ramp entrance, looking at him. At least, that’s the way it seemed. But I didn’t even turn my head as he went by although I made sure to make eye contact. No smiles, no little head nods or a tip of the old fedora. He drove away. I didn’t look after him. Why would I? That way he’d be sure I was there. Or maybe not. He’d think about me. And wonder why I was standing there outside his building ramp just at that time. Then he’d think about the ruts on his pristine lawn, the call to his secretary, the heavy breather.

  I’d wait just a day to see if he got the message. This all might seem petty, even juvenile, but it was relatively harmless. I could engage a more formal legal process, amass sufficient information to sue the bastard, but that would take time and money. The time lost could be dangerous to my clients.

  While the pranksters were at large, I was learning more about the Bartelmes and about Josie’s father, Preston Pederson.

  I decided I should go back to the East Side retirement home to talk with Abe and Tommy some more about their ex-boss and those good ol’ times. I called the home and talked with Abe, who said he’d round up Tommy and be ready when I got there. An hour later I pulled into the driveway of the place to find Abe sitting alone on a bench outside the main door. He looked even gloomier than his sagging jowls usually indicated.

  “What’s up, Abe? Where’s you
r buddy?

  Abe shook his head. “Tommy ain’t here. He had a heart attack, I guess, or mebby a stroke. Ambulance just left.”

  I touched the old man’s shoulder. “Gee, Abe, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to go to the hospital? Where’d they take him?”

  “Regions. I sure would like to go. Tommy’s the only family we got left. Each other, y’ know? But we ain’t kin, so they wouldn’t let me see him.”

  “You let me worry about that. C’mon. I’ll drive you there and see you get back here okay.”

  I helped him into the front seat and we sped off to Regions Hospital. It wasn’t far. While Tommy settled in a chair in the Emergency waiting area, I went looking for a friend of a friend, a nursing supervisor in another part of the hospital. Like all these places, she knew people and about half an hour later, a nurse I didn’t know came to where we were sitting.

  “Are you Sean Sean?”

  I allowed I was that person.

  “Your friend is in the ICU. You can go up to the floor and ask for Ms. Jordan. Use my name if you need to.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We elevatored up and entered the hushed environment of the ICU. Ms. Jordan had been clued in and escorted us to a closed room. “You can go in, but I’m afraid your friend’s been medicated, so he’s not likely to be awake.”

  I gestured Abe through the door and watched. Abe approached the bed slowly and gazed down at his friend. He reached out a gnarled hand and gently slid his palm under Tommy’s where it lay on the sheet. I went to find myself a cup of coffee. When I returned, I found Abe just leaving Tommy’s room, and a doctor and nurse standing by the bed.

  “They wanted me to leave while they examine him.”

  “How is Tommy doing?”

  Abe shrugged. “He’s got tubes and things in him and he’s just lyin’ there, like he’s asleep. An’ I guess he is.”

  We sat together in a small lounge. Abe slumped forward, legs spread and hands clasped between his knees.

  “We knew our times would come, but it’s hard. We’re all the family we got, you know? Outlived ’em all. I hoped I’d be the one to go first.” He glanced over at me. “Selfish, huh?”

  I shrugged. “You feel up to talking to me about Pederson’s old man?”

  “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m not sure.”

  “Just fishing, huh?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Tell me more about when you first went to work for Pederson’s father.”

  Abe nodded and rubbed his forehead. “I can’t remember exactly when I started. Tommy was already there. It must have been around 1950, probably a year or so earlier. We were just kids. Missed the draft ’cause the war ended. Big Jack had a project. He was building near the old Payne Reliever, that strip joint? Anyway, I was looking for work that summer so I just went on down, and there was Tommy. I remembered he’d told me he had landed a job there. Tom sort of talked Big Jack into hiring me part time. That’s the summer I met Kid Cann.” Abe glanced sideways at me as if to see my reaction.

  “Kid Cann?”

  “You don’t know who he is, do you?

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “That wasn’t his real name. People said he was a gangster, a mob guy.”

  I raised that practiced eyebrow. It was supposed to take the place of asking a question. Sometimes it worked.

  “His name was Isidor something. He was a tough kid who grew up on the North Side of Minneapolis. A lotta Jews lived up there in those years.”

  “A ghetto?”

  Abe just looked at me like he didn’t know what the word meant. Maybe he didn’t.

  “Anyway, he got into a lotta stuff and some people said he’d killed a couple of guys back in the thirties or something like that.”

  “Did he get arrested?” If he’d been in a courtroom there’d be a record somewhere. Did I care?

  “I guess. I heard he went to jail eventually, then moved to Florida. He’s dead now.”

  “Abe,” I said, “what does this have to do with the price of anything?”

  “Here’s the thing. After that first time when Kid Cann came to the construction site, he never came back but another guy did. Every week or so. Some guy who looked like a crook. He was a big guy who didn’t look comfortable in a suit, you know what I mean? He’d show up and him and the old man, Pederson, would go into the construction shack for few minutes. Then the guy would walk out and leave. He never said nothin’ to any of the rest of us. I remember he always had a shiny new car. One time it was a Studebaker. Did you ever see one? One year they looked the same, front and back. My dad said you never knew if it was comin’ or goin’.” He grinned.

  We talked some more and it became clear to me Preston’s father was making regular payments to somebody for something. I couldn’t think of another reason for the guy in the suit showing up so routinely. I had no proof, of course. Of anything. It could have been protection, or it could have been to pay a loan, or it could have been blackmail. All it did was make me realize Pop Pederson wasn’t a stranger to the seamier side of life in the big city. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Josie’s dad was somehow involved in whatever this was.

  The problem I had was that Josie’s dad was in no way estranged from his daughter. In my observations of the two of them as well as in conversations with others, it was clear they had affection and love for each other. The entire family was pretty close, even if Dad was getting a little tired of supporting his daughter’s efforts to locate their long-lost relative. Love or not, though, I expected Dad wasn’t about to let his daughter expose some illegal past activities that could get Dad sent off to prison. Maybe he’d decided to torpedo the effort and things had gotten out of hand?

  More questions. Not many answers. I could see Abe was focusing more on his buddy Tommy, so I wound it down. I made him take some money for a cab home when he was done at the hospital. I left Abe waiting for Tommy to regain consciousness and drove home. I wanted to reexamine the cast of characters and see if I couldn’t whittle it down to manageable size before someone else got killed or maimed.

  Chapter 24

  The farther I got into the case, the more convinced I was that somebody in Josie’s family or somebody closely allied with a family member was involved. Either that or something about the quest for Uncle Richard had opened a dank vault somewhere, and the zombie that crawled out was following a smudged trail of footprints in the wet sand.

  First, it was fairly obvious the shooting of Cal was either a mistake, as in an unfortunate case of wrong place and wrong time, or the shooter was really, really good. Killing the boy, I reasoned, would bring down a flood of law, not just the lonely PI presently engaged. So if I could leave that alone, hoping the forensics would turn over the right rock, I had the family of both Josie and Tod, none of whom seemed likely to have the contacts or the resources to want to discourage the quest. With two exceptions I knew of.

  One was Josie’s dad, ol’ Pres Pederson hisself. The other was Hillier. Although he worked for Pederson, he could have his own separate agenda. I would check him out further.

  My first mano a mano encounter with Mr. R.P. Hillier hadn’t gone particularly well, although I’d learned a few things about his present situation. He was probably a partner or a heavy investor in Pederson Enterprises. His role was what was politely called a facilitator in some circles. In these circles, if there was some small bloodletting or doors to be kicked in, intimidation and threat making, he was the man to call. I presumed he had a small stable of thugs he could call on, maybe even at one or two removes.

  My first efforts were remote. I did a wide area Internet search for my target, Mr. Hillier. While the bits and bytes were trembling and assembling, I used the old-fashioned telephone to make a call. With a code word that ch
anged frequently, I was able to obtain a different telephone number. I had to do that three times before I got a street address. To that address I mailed a short query, the name, Social Security number, current address, employment, and a couple other pertinent details. I did not sign the paper. Nor did I put a return address on the envelope.

  Unless the paper was found and examined by some forensic genius, and why would it be, there was almost no way to trace it. I could have worn latex gloves, but that was going a bit far. I knew the letter would be burned after the information was digested. It was an interesting sidelight, I think, to know in this high-tech surveillance era, one way to avoid detection was to use low-tech, old-fashioned means of communication, like the U.S. mail and landline telephones. Not fast, mind you, but almost undetectable.

  I mentioned the advantages of low-tech communication to somebody in a bar once. We were having a drink and talking politics, I think. My companion said, “What about phone taps? And you know the feds sometimes open your mail, right? And they can get a cover to record incoming and outgoing mail addresses, right?”

  “Look,” I said. “Why would they tap your phone? And you can go find a public phone somewhere, like in a library, or a filling station.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And if you don’t want your letter intercepted, go mail it across town, or across the river and use a phony return address. There are still intercepts at NSA from World War Two that haven’t been translated. I think surveillance people in the FBI and other agencies are drowning in information.”

  I was reading an old manual about old weapons when the door hinges whined. They were an early warning signal if someone tried to ease my office door open and surprise me. The door was never locked when I was in residence. Why bother? Most people knocked and I hollered “come in” and they did. If the door was locked I had to get up, cross the office and open it, and that put me face to face with whomever. I’d rather be at my desk across the space, ready to dive for cover. Or a weapon.