“We’ve heard you sold her a purple diamond.”
Kilic’s face closed up like a flower exposed to frost. “Did you.”
“It’s not true?”
“Who told you that?”
“Not important. Did you sell it to her?”
“It was an über-clean stone,” said Kilic. “One point five eight carats, went all the way to fucking Sydney, Australia, to score it. Plus other stuff, but nothing as good, not close.”
“Any of the other stuff go to Meagin?”
“No, but I’d sold her regular diamonds, great stones. Always gave her a good price. Gave her a good price on that one because she made it easy. Paid right away, the checks always cleared. And she was the coolest person. One of the coolest I’ve dealt with.”
“Easygoing.”
“Decisive. She liked something, she bought it, there was none of this let-me-think-about-it bullshit, then you don’t hear from them. Then you do and it’s gone and they get pissed off.”
“Did Meg pay for the purple diamond with a check?”
“Purple fancy intense,” said Kilic. “Never saw anything like it. Once in a lifetime you see something like that. Barely made a profit at the price I gave her.”
“What price was that?”
Kilic’s eyelids lowered, hooding bloodshot sclera and mustard-colored irises. The pale spots created by initial shock had deepened to olive green, like a chameleon adapting to its surroundings. The more time I spent with him, the more lizard-like he seemed.
He folded his arms across his chest. “Why do you need to know that?”
“We’re learning as much as we can about Meagin in order to find out who brutalized her.”
“Bruta — she was raped?”
“Can’t get into details, Mr. Kilic. So what was the price of the stone?”
“What have you been told?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Have you also been told it was a bargain?”
“We have.”
“So you know. That I helped her.”
I said, “We also know you gave her two separate invoices for a hundred each. How come?”
Milo’s green eyes sparked. Bobby Kilic’s mustard pebbles, dull by comparison, did a slow slide to the left.
“What’s the difference?” he said.
“Both receipts are dated identically so it wasn’t a matter of paying in installments.”
Silence.
Milo said, “How come, Mr. Kilic?”
Kilic breathed in. Began coughing and loosened his arms and used one fist to pound his chest. “I don’t see what this has to do with any murder.”
“The relevance, sir, is what it tells us about Meagin’s relationships. Speaking of which, what do you know about that?”
“Nothing. I don’t get into that with clients.”
“Never?”
“If they talk I listen,” said Kilic. “Then I forget. I don’t ask. Besides, Meagin didn’t talk.”
“But she wanted two receipts.”
Another inhalation, more coughing that ended up sounding theatrical.
We stood there.
Bobby Kilic said, “It was nothing evil, just strategy.”
“For?”
“Convincing the husband he got a huge bargain, she said he was money-obsessed, got off on getting deals.”
“That,” I said, “would explain one receipt for half the price, not two.”
“Okay, okay, okay, fine, okay.” Kilic stepped to the side and dragged one foot next to the other. Solo rumba. He reversed it. “Okay, she wanted to impress someone else. No big deal.”
“About getting a bargain.”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“She didn’t say.”
“What did she say about him?”
“Nothing,” said Kilic.
We waited.
“What I assumed,” said Kilic, “was someone she was also... messing with.”
“A lover.”
“I don’t know what it was. There’s all kinds of messing.”
I said, “Serious enough messing to get him to spend a hundred thou.”
“To some people, that’s nothing,” said Bobby Kilic. “To a lot of my clients it’s nothing.”
“What about to you?” said Milo.
“To me? Depends what day you get me. The day I sold that intense purple, a hundred K was no big deal because it was less than I paid for it.”
A beat. “But it was still a bargain for Meg. It made her happy. That’s what I do. Make people happy and bank a few bucks for myself. You want to tell me I did something wrong, read me the law on what it was.”
Milo said, “No one’s saying you did anything wrong, sir. Which is why frankly we’re not getting your attitude. If you admired Meagin like you just said, we’d expect cooperation.”
“That’s what I just gave you. Cooperation. It’s not complicated, I sold her a stone at a great price — she bargained me down, I wanted two forty, she wanted one eighty, she’d bought other pieces from me and I figured I was still doing okay even with fucking Qantas for sixteen hours. So I made her happy and settled on two hundred and if she wanted two pieces of paper what the fuck did I care? Now you’re telling me someone killed her and I’m unhappy. Going to have an unhappy day and an unhappy night and who knows for how long it’s going to be unhappy.”
A few more questions left us with nothing more. Kilic’s demeanor — fatigued, not cagey — led Milo to thank him and hand over a card.
Kilic reached into the same pocket and drew out something wrapped in red foil. Chocolate truffle that he unwrapped with a flourish, announcing, “Chemically active goodness, burnt caramel, coated with Maldon sea salt.”
Maintaining eye contact, he dropped the foil to the ground, popped the chocolate into his mouth, and said, “Yum.”
But his heart wasn’t in it and as we left he’d slumped and was shaking his head mournfully.
As we retraced our steps down the alley, Milo said, “Dope’s legal in B.H., but smoking anything — tobacco, dope — isn’t. Coulda called the locals.”
I said, “Like they’d care.”
“True. No problem for me, the stuff should never have been illegal in the first place. Not that I indulge.”
“Anymore.”
“We all have an anymore, right? Then you gotta concentrate on keeping the brain in decent order.”
We got back in the car, he U-turned and drove east.
“Two receipts,” he said. “Very elegant the way you sprang that on him.”
“Lucky guess.”
“I’d been wondering when to bring it up then you pounced.” He turned one hand into a claw. “Good timing, it opened him up. Too bad it doesn’t tell us what we didn’t already suspect. Some schemer, our Meg. Whatever her real name is. I’m starting to think nothing I know about her is real.”
A block later, in the midst of a Beverly Hills shopping jam, he said, “Calls her friends, her guy on the side, and a church. Hey, maybe she used to be a nun.”
I said, “Anything’s possible.”
“I was kidding.”
I was too preoccupied to answer. Googling st. jerome’s church san pietro.
I said, “Oh boy.”
“What?”
“Find a spot and pull over.”
He turned left on Rodeo, driving away from the famous three blocks and toward the residences in the flats north of Big Santa Monica. Lucking out with a green light, he continued for half a block before parking.
“What?”
I showed him. “One of six hits, they all say the same thing.”
He took my phone, read, cursed loud and long.
Chapter 28
Two days after the murders of Meagin March and Gio Aggiunta, a homicide had taken place in the parking lot of St. Jerome’s Church in San Pietro.