"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 it 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.