“Thanks for reminding me.”
“All she ever wanted was that bag of jewels, and she would’ve killed anybody who got in her way.” He drifted through a yellow-red light. “You should have known she was involved in Meacham’s murder. Hell, I knew from the beginning.”
“Sure you did.”
“I don’t mean knew as in knew. I mean knew.” He rubbed a fat thumb over the pads of his fingers. “I could feel it.”
“If that’s true, Dalrymple, then why’d you work so hard to put me away?”
“Because I thought you pulled the trigger on Meacham. Why the fuck do you think?”
“Because you hate my guts.”
He stopped in front of my apartment house.
“I do,” he said. “More or less. But I get paid to apprehend perpetrators, not to toss every jerk in jail who gives me tight jaws. I’m a cop.”
“I’ve heard rumors to that effect.”
He grunted good-bye and drove away.
Vaz and Sophia were waiting to help me upstairs, whether I needed it or not. Sophia made soup and fussed like a hen over her sick chick. Vaz showed me Fontaine’s original journal and the decoded version. He’d tried to tell me Monday morning that he’d broken the code, but I’d been too preoccupied to listen.
“Fontaine’s code was fairly simple,” Vaz said. “He wrote backward, placing a null letter in the middle of each five-letter group. Look at the last page, the one dated September fifteenth, the one I showed you before. If you start at the end and read forward, skipping over the middle letter of each—”
“Vassily, please,” Sophia said. “Jacob needs his rest.”
When they’d gone, I read through Fontaine’s decoded journal. Other than one early entry that made me sit up straight, there was little in it that I didn’t already know. It was clear from Fontaine’s more recent entries that if he’d recovered the Lochemont jewels, he’d have tried to keep them for himself. His biggest mistake, though, had been in underestimating the viciousness of Helen Ester. But then, look who’s talking.
The early entry that had caught my eye was dated nearly twenty years ago, when Fontaine was conducting his investigation for National and his loyalties were still with the company.
Spoke again today with Trenton Lochemont, Sr. Still extremely upset over the death of little Emily Sue Ott during the robbery. Actually cried, saying he felt guilty. Then confessed to me that he’d discussed the possibility of saving his faltering business by robbing his own store, but that it had never been more than “bedroom talk.” When I asked what his wife’s reaction had been to such talk, he said he hadn’t meant his wife. Then he regained his composure and refused to speak further on the matter. He swore he would deny he’d admitted anything to me.
I had a fair idea who old man Lochemont had been sleeping with on the sly. Helen Ester had covered every angle before the robbery.
Later that day I phoned Neal Ullman at National Insurance to get the latest word on Soames and Caroline.
“We’ve found no trace of them,” he said. “Yet. They’ve no doubt left the state, but I guarantee they won’t get out of the country.”
“Don’t be too sure,” I said, trying not to grin.
“You sound like you want them to get away.”
“Maybe I do.”
“They’re thieves, Lomax. They have no right to those jewels.”
“No? Then tell me, Ullman, what price would you put on twenty years of a man’s life?”
He muttered something, then slammed down the phone.
Harry Witherspoon dropped by on Thursday. He’d found the negatives of the shots taken twenty years ago in Idaho Springs—the ones of Ed Teague arguing with a cop beside his car. He’d made a pair of eight-by-ten glossies, reprints of the ones Fontaine had had with him the night he’d been murdered. The passenger in Ed Teague’s car, blocked from view in the photos I’d found in Fontaine’s manila envelope, was clearly revealed here. Of course it was Helen Ester. She looked young and beautiful and unafraid. Invulnerable. Perhaps that image would eventually replace the one I carried of her lying in the snow. Perhaps after my chest wounds healed.
A few days later a shoebox-sized package arrived in the mail. It noticeably cheered me up. It was full of money.
I counted it out twice and got the same number both times: fifty thousand dollars. Also in the box, wrapped in wads of tissue paper, was Baby Doe Tabor’s ruby necklace. With it was a note, unsigned and handprinted on cheap paper:
Here’s your commission like we agreed on before. Keep it or give it away or do whatever the hell you want with it. The necklace belongs to the museum.
The package was postmarked Seattle. At least they’d gotten that far. Maybe that’s where Caroline would find her young man and Soames would find his beach. I hoped so. The only trouble was, it got pretty cold up there. And it was too close to here.
Soames was right about one thing, though: The necklace belonged to the museum. The money was another matter. I began to wonder if I should turn over the fifty grand to National Insurance. Then I thought about how broke I was and how many unpaid bills I had and how my poor crippled Olds was still stuck on the side of a mountain and how I’d been beat up and shot at and shot, and I stopped wondering. I could try to claim the reward money for the necklace, but this was better. And more certain. And like the man said, money won smells twice as sweet as money earned.
I took Baby Doe Tabor’s necklace to the folks at the state historical museum. They couldn’t accept it.
The problem was that legally the necklace belonged to National Insurance, who had settled long ago with Lochemont Jewelers for six hundred thousand dollars, half of which Trenton Lochemont, Sr., had returned to the museum, since that was the amount for which the museum had the piece insured. The other half, of course, had gone into old man Lochemont’s pocket. But with the return of the necklace, no one was quite sure what to do. National owned it and would sell it for no less than six hundred thousand dollars. The museum couldn’t come up with that kind of money.
There was talk that National might auction off the piece to private collectors.
And then, to the surprise and gratitude of the museum and the insurance company and the public at large, Trenton Lochemont, Jr., bought the necklace from National Insurance and donated it to the museum.
Lochemont refused to be interviewed about his magnanimous act, so the media quickly produced three theories about why he’d been so generous: one, it was a tax write-off; two, it was great publicity for his jewelry store; and three, it simply made him feel good. I know it made me feel good, especially since no one suggested that Lochemont had been shown a certain entry from a certain dead private eye’s journal concerning his late father’s duplicity and that he’d been assured he’d read that entry in the local newspapers if he didn’t perform his good deed.
A month later, around the middle of November, while the city was suffering through its first big snowstorm of the year, the necklace was put on display behind heavy glass at the state historical museum. On that same day I received a postcard from sunny Australia. There was no written message.
The picture on the front showed a young man and woman astride horses on a beach. The sky was clear, the ocean was blue, and the water lapped at the horses’ hooves. The animals were healthy and eager and bursting with life. So was the young couple. They were pointing at someone who was little more than a dot, far up the sunny coastline. They were smiling.
Acknowledgments
For their generosity and patience in telling me what’s what, I wish to thank Charles J. Onofrio, attorney-at-law; Mel Apodaca, investigator for the Denver coroner’s office; and Kim Knox, rock climber. Any errors are certainly mine.
Turn the page to continuing reading from the Jacob Lomax Mysteries
CHAPTER
1
IT WAS BELOW FREEZING, but Joseph Bellano wanted to walk.
“Can’t we talk in my office, where it’s warm?” I suggested.
> “Your office might be bugged.”
Bellano was shorter, heavier, and twenty years older than I; I’d say five ten or so, two hundred pounds plus, and mid-fifties. He was also more immune to the cold. I had on corduroy pants, a shirt, a wool sweater, heavy socks, boots, a ski parka, gloves, a scarf, and a knit cap pulled down over my ears, and I was still shivering. I was also certain my office wasn’t bugged.
“How about we sit in my car and turn on the heat?”
“That, too.”
“Come on, no one bugs cars, not even in the movies.”
Bellano shook his round head. His ears and bulbous nose were turning red from the cold. He should have had on a hat—his hair was thinning on top. The rest of it was long, the way barbers like to wear it. There was a lot of gray mixed in with the black.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m getting paranoid. But you gotta understand, the feds are on me like fleas on an old rug, and I don’t know how far they’ll go. I know for a fact they’ve tapped the phone in my shop. So let’s just walk and talk, okay?”
“Sure.” I pulled the scarf up around my chin.
We headed north on Broadway. The afternoon traffic mushed by the other way. There was still a lot of old snow left over from a few days ago. Most of it was piled along the curb and against the brick buildings. It was so gray from sand and pollution that it hardly looked like snow. At least the sidewalks were shoveled clean. Temporarily. Tiny icy flakes fell from the dead sky. They were sticking to the concrete and soon would make footing treacherous.
“It’s my daughter,” Bellano said grimly. “She disappeared three days ago. I’ve called around, friends and all, no one’s seen her. Her mother’s going crazy.”
Obviously, he was, too.
“I can imagine,” I said. “Have you talked to the police?”
He nodded yes. “Not that they’re that eager to help me right now.”
Bellano thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his black overcoat. His heavy shoulders were bent, and his collar was turned up. It made him look like a middle-aged mafioso. But he was no criminal. Unless you called someone who runs a sports book out of his barbershop a criminal. Which, by the way, I don’t.
“I called the cops Saturday morning,” he said, “after she didn’t come home Friday night. They told me she’s not a ‘missing person’ until she’s been gone for seventy-two hours. I went down there today and signed some papers. So now it’s official. She’s missing. Then I called around to get the name of a decent private snoop, er, no offense.”
“Hey, I’m used to it.”
I’d been in the business for four years, and I’d been called a lot worse. Also punched, spat on, and shot. So I guess “snoop” wasn’t so bad.
We waited for the light at Twelfth Avenue. The big window of Howard Lorton Galleries on the corner was hung with a twelve-foot Christmas wreath. Tomorrow was December first.
The light changed, and we crossed the street. My freezing toes were thankful for the movement.
“Where did you last see your daughter?”
“In my barbershop Friday morning. A few hours after I’d been busted.”
I’d read about Bellano’s arrest.
A dozen of the bigger bookies in town had been rounded up by a special crime unit made up of federal agents and members of the Denver police. A truckload of evidence had been confiscated. Most of the bookies were otherwise honest businessmen who also happened to act as clearinghouses for those eager to wager on sporting events. But every ten or twelve years some civic group decided to purge the city of gamblers. Make it safe for their kids. Meanwhile, the state ran the lottery and lotto and dog races, and the sports pages of the morning papers carried the point spread for every ball game in the country, pro and college.
This year, though, the feds were trying to tie the bookies to organized crime.
“Do you think there’s a connection between your daughter’s running and your arrest?”
“Absolutely. You gotta understand, Stephanie is a sweet kid, barely eighteen. Polite, respectful. Her mother raised her to be a good Catholic. She never knew I was making book until the cops showed up at the house Friday. She went to pieces.”
“You’re telling me that your eighteen-year-old daughter didn’t know you were a bookie?”
“No.”
“How could you keep something like that from her?”
“Because I didn’t want her to think her father was a crook.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant ‘how?’”
“Oh. Well, for one thing my wife and I never told her. I always took care of the bets and the money at my shop, where she rarely goes. My books I keep on a computer at home, but it’s locked up in the den. Off limits. Anyhow, Steph thought all I did in there was play the stock market, which I do, some. Did.”
“You kept your books on a computer?”
“Why not? It’s the electronic age.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
We passed leafless trees poking up through the frozen sidewalk. They belonged to the new Security Life Building. It stood on the former site of Azar’s Big Boy, where a guy used to be able to go in and get a cup of coffee and get warm. I wiped my nose with the back of my glove.
“Tell me about Friday,” I said.
“The cops came into my shop first thing in the morning and pulled me downtown. They also went through my house with a search warrant and confiscated all my records. Almost all. The jerks missed one copy right under their noses. Anyway, Stephanie was home with her mother. The poor kid didn’t know what was going on. When the cops left, Angela explained it all to her. She didn’t take it well.”
“What did she do?”
“She drove straight to my shop.”
We crossed Thirteenth. A truck had stopped in the crosswalk. Its nose dripped dirty icicles. We had to step around it, out near the lanes of traffic on Broadway. We got frozen slush splattered on our pants. Bellano didn’t seem to mind.
“When she came in, I was cutting hair and—”
“Wait a minute. This was a few hours after your arrest and you were already working?”
Bellano nodded. “I’d been charged, printed, pictured, and bailed out. I was back cutting hair before noon. Also taking bets.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Hell, no. No way am I gonna close down, not with the Broncos playing tonight. Monday night. National TV. That brings the part-time gamblers right outta the woodwork.”
Which reminded me that I’d laid a nickel with my bookie earlier in the week. After all, the line was Denver by three, and I figured they’d stomp Seattle. Plus, I had money to burn from my last case, so five hundred didn’t seem like much of a risk. Actually five fifty, counting the vigorish.
“Anyway,” Bellano said as we made it to the curb, “me and Sal are in there cutting hair, a few customers waiting, all of them trying to cheer me up, and in charges Stephanie like the wrath of God.”
Bellano smiled.
“I’d never seen her like that,” he said. “At first it was kinda funny. To me, anyhow. The other guys in there, though, were staring with their mouths hanging open, like who the hell is this broad?
“Stephanie’s yelling about how I betrayed her all these years and how she hopes me and my pals all go to prison and how she doesn’t want to ever see me again. And then it’s not funny anymore.”
He frowned. “I tried to calm her down, but it was no good. She threw the keys to her car at me and said she didn’t want anything that was paid for with dirty money. Then she ran out of the shop. I went after her, but she was already down the block. She turned the corner. That was the last time I saw her.”
“You said you called around. Friends and relatives.”
“Me and Angela called everybody. Nothing.” He shook his head for emphasis.
“Does Stephanie have a boyfriend?”
“Not that I know about.”
“What about her girlfriends? Could she be hiding wi
th one of them?”
“She’s only got a couple of girlfriends, and they live with their parents. I’ve called them.”
When we reached the corner, Bellano turned right. Ahead lay the capitol. Its gold dome was as dull as a penny.
“There’s probably something else you should know,” Bellano said. Then he sniffled—the first sign that the cold was affecting him. He wiped his nose with a folded white handkerchief. “There’s more to this gambling bust than they put in the papers. The cops and the feds aren’t too concerned with us small fries. They’re mostly after one guy. Fat Paulie DaNucci.” I see.
“The prosecutors are pushing me and some others to turn state’s evidence against DaNucci,” Bellano said. “They’d like us to admit we were working for him. This would strengthen their case quite a bit. Of course, this is bullshit. We’re all independent. Sure, there’s guys who lay off bets with DaNucci if they’re getting too much action on one side or the other. I’ve done it myself. But it’s only because DaNucci’s big enough to handle it. On the other hand, I’m a little different than the rest.”
I knew that Fat Paulie DaNucci wasn’t simply a bookie. He was connected. Mafia. Everyone knew that. Of course, knowing it was easier than proving it.
We turned right at Lincoln and walked south, back the way we’d come.
“I’ve been making book a lot longer than most,” Bellano explained. “I started before there was a bookie in every tavern and office building in the city. You know, before it was ‘respectable.’ And back then I was, well, acquainted with Fat Paulie. Let’s just say that I know one or two things about him that could embarrass him. In a legal sense. Of course, he knows this, too. It might be making him nervous.”
“Do you think he might have kidnapped your daughter?”
“It crossed my mind. He says no, though.”
“You talked to DaNucci?”
“I called him, sure. At his restaurant. He says he knows nothing from nothing. He got mad that I’d think he’d do something like that.”
Blood Stone (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 2) Page 23
