Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13)

by Todd Borg

  “Did he say anything about why he had to leave town?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Had it seemed like anything was odd with him recently? Like he had any kind of trouble? Or did he talk about any big change that was coming for him?”

  Another head shake. “The only thing different in the last few days was that he stopped talking about his never-ending microbrew plans. It used to be he couldn’t be at work for more than a half hour without he’d bring up beer. He said he was going to call it Bold Brew. And he talked about the Bold concept incessantly. Then he suddenly stopped mentioning it. I even asked him if he was still going to do it, and he said he didn’t know.”

  “What about his roommate Darla Ali? Did he talk about her?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t believe. He talked about her so much it was like he was trying to convince us that he was worried about her. I mean, anyone would be worried if their roommate disappeared, right? It’s not like we’d need convincing.”

  I thanked the woman and left.

  FORTY-NINE

  I called Vince Russo. This time he answered.

  I explained who I was and that I’d talked to Old Man Joseph and learned that Vince had bought a bunch of his Sinatra stuff. I didn’t volunteer over the phone that Joseph was in the hospital with serious injuries, nor that the persons who’d assaulted Joseph had likely been led to him by me.

  It was one of the conundrums of my business. To pursue a murderer is to agitate and provoke and put innocent people at risk, a most unfortunate risk. But to let a murderer go free possibly puts more people at risk.

  I decided I would talk to Vince first, then inform him of the hazards later.

  Vince said he’d love to “talk Sinatra” with me.

  I drove down the East Shore to South Lake Tahoe. During much of the drive I saw the same car in the rearview mirror, two or three cars back. It was a silver Subaru Outback, which, because it was all-wheel-drive, was possibly the most common car in Tahoe. It was also what Sanford Burroughs drove.

  About four miles past the state line, I took a right on Tahoe Keys Boulevard and headed out to the Keys, an upscale neighborhood on miles of inland waterways that were dredged out in the 1960s. The roads can be confusing. When I couldn’t find Vince’s house, I realized I’d come down the wrong street. It seemed his house was just across the canal in front of me. But what was a short distance by water was a long way by road.

  When I turned around, there was the silver Subaru Outback. Or maybe it was a different silver Outback.

  I got back on Tahoe Keys Boulevard. The next intersection was a fair distance down and around a slight curve. I accelerated. When I got to the intersection, I’d come around the curve enough that I could no longer see the silver Outback. I jerked the wheel, pulled off, and stopped behind a group of fir trees.

  It only took 30 seconds to realize that the Subaru had stopped or turned off.

  I drove back to search. The Subaru was gone.

  Maybe it was someone innocent. Or maybe it was Sanford Burroughs, and he realized that I was onto him.

  I found Vince Russo’s house and parked on the street.

  The house was a large two story with a two-car garage tucked under the front portion. I left Spot in the Jeep and found the doorbell.

  The door opened. A short grizzled man around 80 years old saw me and made a big grin. His teeth were numerous, perfectly lined up, and white as whipped cream. His thick, brown hair was styled like a heavy-nap, shag carpet. It sat crooked on his head.

  He reached out his hand and gave me a strong shake.

  “I’m Vince Russo. You must be Owen McKenna. Good to meet you. I was upstairs, and I saw your dog with his head out the window, and he drew a bead on me in the upstairs window. It was love at first sight. Will you bring him in, or do I have to go and cavort with him outside?” The man had a classic radio voice, deep and soothing, with crisp pronunciation.

  “I’m happy to bring him in.” I took a quick look inside Vince’s house, trying to anticipate problems. Over by the big living room windows was an expensive-looking telescope. On a white pedestal near a black baby grand piano was a somewhat abstracted bronze of a singer at a mike, no doubt a loose representation of Sinatra. Many items that Spot could knock over.

  “I see what you’re looking for. Your dog’s a wagger, huh? I have some delicate stuff that survived the recent earthquake. Hate to lose it to a Dane’s tail. My sister, bless her soul, had three Danes years back. Two were waggers, one was not. I’ll clear the tables and tail-proof the joint while you go get him.”

  So I went back to the Jeep and fetched Spot. Vince and Spot met like they were old friends who’d been apart for years. Vince rubbed Spot’s neck, and Spot leaned against him, and then Vince got Spot to shake, catching his heavy paw with both hands and giving it a big up and down motion.

  “He’s a big fella, that’s for sure.” Vince led Spot indoors. A large, reddish orange cat saw Spot and ran up the stairs into reassuring darkness. “Okay, Spot,” Vince said. “You and me, we’re gonna sit over here, away from the telescope and sculpture. I’ve got a rug in front of my chair and with the carpet, it’s practically an American Kennel Club-certified doggie bed.”

  Amazingly, Spot did exactly as Vince wanted, lying down in front of Vince’s chair.

  “Okay, watch this.” Vince winked at me as he sat down in the chair. He lifted up one of his legs and laid it across Spot’s back. Spot didn’t move. “Do I know Danes or what?”

  “You know them,” I said. “I hear you had a radio show devoted to Sinatra.” I sat down across from Vince.

  “Yep. Fifteen years. Those were fun days. Sinatra tunes brought out the camaraderie. Of course, everyone had a Sinatra story. Everyone had his records and watched his movies, and a large number had seen him perform at one time or another. My listeners were Sinatra’s hard core fans. Sinatra’s specialty was that he really connected with his audience. And I was the beneficiary of all that goodwill. Sinatra himself even called into my show one time. So I asked if I could get an autographed photo, and he sent me one.” Vince turned and pointed to a wall of pictures. “There it is, second one down on the right. Signed to Vince. Is that a kick or what?”

  I walked over and looked at the picture, then turned to the glass display case that was built into a corner. There were two shelves. Each one held a glass sculpture of Sinatra, about eighteen inches tall, and they were lit from below so they glowed. They showed two different sides of Sinatra, one the smiling charisma of the electrifying showman, and the other appearing to show Sinatra with a dramatic melancholy.

  “Old Man Joseph, who sold you his collection of Sinatra memorabilia, said you also had other Sinatra memorabilia besides what you got from him.”

  Vince beamed. “I’m Sinatra’s number one fan.”

  “I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of the Blue Fire of Florence? It refers to one of the world’s greatest diamonds, possibly no more than a rumor, but possibly real. From my inquiries, I’m leaning toward real.”

  “Well, now, you sure know how to pique a man’s curiosity. Of course, I already saw the newspaper article about you and the diamond. Maybe I know something. But you go first.”

  “You may have heard about the woman who was recently shot and killed at Squaw Valley.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “Her name was Scarlett Milo. After she was shot, but before she died, she wrote a note about the Blue Fire of Florence. It wasn’t clear what she was trying to communicate, but my sense was that she thought she’d been shot because of the Blue Fire of Florence. Another woman and man who possibly knew about the diamond were killed before Milo was killed. So I did some research on the Blue Fire of Florence and was told that Sinatra’s mother Dolly bought it on his behalf.”

  Vince raised a single eyebrow. It seemed like he knew part or all of the story, but he wanted to see what I knew.

  I continued. “Sinatra paid two million back in the early s
ixties. Dolly delivered the money in cash to an Italian mobster named Bruno Valenti, who stole the diamond on what he described as a custom purchase order. They made the transaction at a meeting in Genoa, Italy, where Dolly’s sister lived.”

  Vince was still keeping silent.

  I thought about what I’d recently learned about Sinatra. “I don’t know what Sinatra did with the diamond,” I said, “but if I were to make a guess, I’d throw out the very original notion that he maybe wanted it to woo a woman.”

  Vince grinned.

  I continued, “Sinatra had been involved with Marilyn Monroe in the fifties during the time he was married to Ava Gardner. Around nineteen sixty, Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller collapsed during or right after the filming of The Misfits. This was the time when Sinatra introduced Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy. Shortly after that, Monroe had an affair with the president. I got to thinking that Sinatra hadn’t wanted that result, and I wondered if he wasn’t hoping to win Monroe back. He’d been with her once, and he knew what he’d been missing.”

  This time I paused.

  Vince looked at me. “An interesting story, some of which I’ve heard before.”

  “From whom?” I asked.

  “Back when I had the radio show, I would get letters from Sinatra fans. One day in the middle nineteen nineties, I got an unusual letter. Of course, that was before most of us had email. The letter was from Italy and it came to the radio station. It was written in English. The letter writer wanted to know if I had ever heard of the Blue Fire of Florence. She’d been going through old Italian newspapers at the library and had seen pictures of Sinatra in a gossip column. She said the column talked about a diamond that was rumored to have been originally acquired by the Medicis of Florence. The column also reported another rumor from the nineteen sixties speculating that the so-called Blue Fire of Florence had been stolen from a Florentine family and sold to an agent of Frank Sinatra. The column mentioned that this was during the time when Sinatra owned a hotel at Lake Tahoe. So the letter writer learned that I was in Tahoe and that I had a show based on Sinatra. Thus her question about whether or not I had any information about the diamond.”

  “And did you?” I asked.

  Vince Russo grinned. “Give me a minute, and I’ll show you something interesting.”

  He carefully lifted his foot off of Spot, stood up, and walked over to the display case with the Sinatra sculptures. He raised up on tiptoes, reached up to the top of the case, which was about my height, and removed a photograph.

  “In the stuff I bought from Old Man Joseph, there were quite a few pictures of Sinatra. Most in frames. One day, I was pulling the backs off the frames to see if anything had been written on the backs of the photos. In one frame, I found this, a picture hiding in the back of the frame.”

  He handed a curved photo to me. “Careful not to straighten the photo or flex it, as the surface is brittle.”

  It was a five-by-seven, black and white photo, printed on glossy paper.

  The picture showed Marilyn Monroe alone out on a pier on Lake Tahoe. She was wearing a filmy, white dress that appeared to glow in the setting sun.

  “It was one of those mood shots,” Vince said, “the beautiful girl who has everything anyone could ever want, right? But in that picture, she’s looking very lonely, don’t you think?”

  Marilyn was standing at the end of the pier, her elbows resting on the railing. In the open palm of her left hand, she held a huge gemstone. It was the size of a chicken egg that had been sliced in half lengthwise. And even in this old black and white photo, I could see that it sparkled like it was lit from the inside.

  Monroe was staring at the stone, a sad look on her face.

  “Pretty obvious, don’t you think?” Vince said. “That has to be the Blue Fire of Florence.” Vince’s resonant voice wavered as he said it. “You’d think that the moment Sinatra gave Monroe the Blue Fire of Florence, it would become famous, right? There would be pictures everywhere. Yet it didn’t. And no one has ever seen pictures of it. So the question is why not?”

  Vince sat back down. This time, he lifted his other leg to rest on Spot’s back. “I think the only possible answer is that the diamond disappeared. Neither Frank nor Marilyn ever mentioned it. And there are no other photos of it. Otherwise, we’d have seen them a thousand times. So the only reason must be that Marilyn rejected it. And then Sinatra did something with it. Either intentionally or unintentionally, he hid it. Or maybe it’s sitting on the bottom of the lake, sixteen hundred feet down.”

  “There’s an idea to contemplate,” I said. “Sinatra throwing a two million-dollar diamond into the lake. A diamond that might be worth two hundred million today.”

  “No kidding.” Vince was shaking his head. “You said you heard that he paid the mob two million for it?”

  “Yeah. Told to me in a little medieval town in Tuscany by the very mobster who stole it and then sold it. He was on his deathbed.”

  “Sinatra was extravagant,” Vince said. “But I can’t imagine him throwing away that kind of money. Plus, he had money issues now and then. Not your kind or my kind of money issues. But until he sold Reprise Records, he wasn’t as flush as everyone thought. So there’s another reason for him not to be too wasteful. Obviously, he was willing to spend the money, and, in his mind, Marilyn would have been worth the fuss. I’ve read several things here and there that suggest he was stuck on her. ’Course, who wouldn’t be. But once the girl says no, any rational guy is going to do something else with the stone, sell it at the very least. Not throw it away, never to be seen again. Sinatra was rational.”

  Vince made a little lip-smacking noise. “There is, however, a possible extenuating circumstance. You’ve no doubt heard that Sinatra referred to himself as an eighteen-karat manic-depressive. Some people might think that he could toss the rock in a manic moment. But I doubt it. However, when I think of what I know about depression, I could see him tossing it when he was in the depths of despair.” Vince reached out and pet Spot.

  “Do you still have the letter you got from Italy?” I asked.

  “Sure. It’s upstairs. I’ll go get it.”

  Vince got up and headed up the staircase.

  After he’d disappeared into one of the upstairs bedrooms, the big red-orange cat appeared and sat on the top step. It looked down at Spot. Spot focused on the cat, but he stayed put.

  I got up and looked out the big windows. Although the landscape was darkening with twilight, I could see down the canal that stretched out toward the big lake. There were two floating docks that had been left in all winter. One was Vince’s and the other was some distance down. While the body of Lake Tahoe doesn’t freeze in the winter, the canals in the keys do, so homeowners put their boats in storage during the winter. The water was now thawed in the spring sunshine, but most of the boats wouldn’t return until summer.

  The canal Vince lived on had a gentle curve. A hundred yards down, the canal joined the large open water area that was within the keys and near the channel out to the main lake. In that open area was a boat. As I looked into the gathering darkness, I thought I sensed a person standing up in the boat. The silhouette of the person went out to the sides as if the person had their hands up to their forehead, elbows pointing out.

  My immediate thought was that the person had binoculars and was looking in our direction. Maybe even at Vince’s house.

  I walked over to Vince’s telescope, bent down and looked through the eyepiece. All I saw was black. I tried turning a knob that may or may not have been a focus knob. Still black.

  “You need to take the lens cap off,” Vince said as he came down the stairs. “I often use it to look up at the stars. If I leave it pointed up, the main lens catches a lot of dust. The downside to having an actual wood-burning fireplace. So I’ve trained myself to put on the lens cap.”

  I looked at the large end and saw that there was a snap-on black cap. I pulled it off. Now I could see through the scope. I trained it
back and forth.

  The powerboat was no longer there.

  “What are you looking for?” Vince asked.

  “I saw a boat out there. Seemed like a person on the boat had binoculars and was looking this way.”

  “Oh, that happens all the time. Lakeshore people and boat people all have binoculars with them wherever they go.” Vince pointed at his telescope. “My scope is the same thing, only more magnified. We’re all looking at everything through a lens. Even at night. You get used to it.”

  The cat started walking down the stairs, looking away from Spot, nonchalant, uninterested.

  Spot was still watching the cat. “Spot, stay,” I said.

  “That’s Ruby,” Vince said. “Probably the biggest she-cat in the county. But she’ll run terrified from a terrier half her size.”

  “Smart cat,” I said.

  “She doesn’t appear to be afraid of your hound. How’s that? His head is bigger than she is.”

  “Spot isn’t dangerous to cats.”

  “And somehow she can tell.” Vince was shaking his head.

  Vince handed me a piece of paper. It was a handwritten letter from the Italian teenager. After I was able to figure out the words, the message was as Vince had reported. There was nothing that suggested I could learn anything else.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time on this,” I said, “and I had to go to Tuscany to learn about the diamond. Yet, here you were all along with this information.”

  “Not all of it. From the photo, I figured the diamond probably existed. But I didn’t know how Sinatra got it.”

  Ruby got to the bottom of the stairs, walked over to the baby grand piano, and sat down underneath. She appeared to not notice Spot.

  “Why’d you stay so private about this photo?” I asked.

  Vince made a half smile. “I own one of the largest collections of Sinatra stuff in the world, show announcements and movie posters, photos, award trophies and statuettes, Grammy Awards, Gold Record Awards, movie paraphernalia, clothes, even old shoes. I’ve been through it all many times, so I knew the diamond wasn’t there, hiding in a watch pocket or something. But I wondered if somewhere in the notes and letters and songbooks and lead sheets might be an indication of where it might be, whether Monroe had in fact given it back to Sinatra, and where Sinatra might have stashed it.”