The Face of the Seal

by Jennifer Cumiskey

  But maybe not. Simone had been withdrawn, distracted. It’s possible William retracted his retirement fund promise, and she’s got nothing. She didn’t just go to the bathroom, she left and may be drowning her sorrows in some cheap, filthy bar.

  Walters glanced at his Rolex watch, and again around the table. The red-faced Chinese were quiet now, quite a few of them looked tired, sleepy. He was glad they’d be going back to China tomorrow. Keeping up the appearance of a high-art dealer could be exhausting and expensive. For now, it was time to deliver his prepared speech for the successful conclusion of a cultural exchange. Besides, he had one more thing to do before William left town. His reputation, and possibly his life, depended on it.

  *

  New York City, the night of the murder, 10:16 p.m.

  The private elevator ascended to the penthouse and slid open. Walters stepped out and walked to the entrance door. He slotted the key into the deadbolt, aware that this was likely to be the last time he’d be opening this door as if he was the owner of this magnificent place. William had asked for the key back. He turned the key but didn’t hear that smooth, luxurious click. The door was not locked from the inside.

  “Anybody here?” Walter announced himself.

  No answer.

  Maybe he’d gone to bed early. If William brought it here, it should be in the study. Walters tiptoed quietly around the base of the spiral staircase toward the study. He flipped the light switch on the wall next to the door and shot an anxious look at the desk across the room. Lucky him, the replicated empress seal was sitting on its face atop the desk, next to the King Arthur’s sword letter opener. At least the bastard kept his promise. He marched over, grabbed the seal and examined the stone face—nothing special. William must have kept it for nostalgic reasons. Walters knew how much William adored the great-grandfather he’d never met. He dropped the seal in his coat pocket and decided not to fuss over it. Most likely Madam Jin was chasing down the original face for its historic value. As he’d been told, he would drop it at Heikkinen’s place after he got out of there. He’d performed well again in Act Two of the Empress Seal drama. Madam Jin was no more, except in the manner of the subsidy his gallery had been receiving. It might go on for a while, even if only a short while.

  Walters backed away from the desk and debated if he should go upstairs to see William and to bid his ceremonial goodbye. Maybe not. Why complicate things? He would just leave the key on the council table on his way out . . .

  “What are you doing here?” A voice came from behind him, cold, watery, shaky. Startled, he wheeled around. Simone was standing at the door, her face death white, streaked with tears and melting mascara. She was still wearing her black pantsuit but the fuck-me heels were gone. Her arms folded at her chest, her hands clutching the sleeves of her suit jacket. She looked so much shorter, smaller—a reedy, shivering scarecrow.

  “I’d ask you the same thing? What’s going on?”

  “I, I didn’t mean to kill him . . . but . . .”

  “You did what?”

  “I killed him . . .”

  Shit, the bitch has gone psycho.

  Walters pushed past Simone and dashed toward the staircase. He leapt up the steps two and three at a time. The door to the bedroom was wide open, he could see the body on the bed. He stomped toward it.

  Blackwell lay on his back, lifeless, vacant eyes bloodshot, gazing up at the ceiling. Part of his tongue stuck out, lolling to one side of his mouth, a tie still looped around his neck. Instinctively, he fumbled his pockets for his cell phone. He needed to call 911, the police.

  “Please don’t call the police, it was an accident. If you help me, I’ll do whatever you want,” Simone’s watery voice begged.

  Walters turned to face her. “If you don’t know already, you are no use to me. I can’t be associated with a death, especially for someone like William. No, no, let me get this straight, you bitch. You killed him, and I don’t want to know why. When the police arrive, you confess you killed him and that it has nothing to do with me. I’m not going to let a whore like you tarnish my reputation,” Walters growled. He knew that no matter what, it didn’t look good for him that his longtime assistant turned out to be a psychopathic killer. The whole city would soon know.

  “I have no use to you? Think of the money I’ve made for you the past two years. Don’t deny that you and I have partnered well.”

  Simone had stopped shivering, the fear in her voice giving way to anger. Walters was furious she was forcing him to acknowledge her value as a capable assistant. But that was in the past. William was gone, for good. Simone was nothing but an over-the-hill hag, she meant nothing to him anymore. He should call the cops and get the bitch out of his life, anyway. He was about to stab 911 on his cell but what came out of Simone’s mouth left his fingers hanging in midair.

  “Go ahead, call the cops. They may arrest me for killing William but jail is waiting for you, too. I’ll tell them what’s in your gallery other than your so-called world-class art, you fucked up queer. In fact, the world will know you’re nothing but a lowlife drug pusher,” Simone seethed.

  Bang! A loud pop in his head, a disconnection in the nerves that propelled his thinking. Everything around him blurred out, echoes howled like a winter blizzard. “Go ahead, call the cops . . . cops . . .” He blinked, a light flashed behind his eyelids before Simone’s icy stare zoomed in, taunting, defiant. He’d never expected that stare could be coming from that fucking skeletal body of Simone’s. Think on your feet, don’t let the bitch get the upper hand.

  Walters lowered the cell. “Very well, maybe there’s a way our partnership could continue.” He dialed down the fury in his voice. “Just give me a second and you can tell me exactly what happened here.” Walters pointed at the bathroom. “Okay?”

  He hurried into the bathroom of the master suite and closed the door behind him. He turned on the recording function on his cell and waited for a moment. He flushed the toilet, switched on the vanity faucet and let the water run. Meanwhile, he opened the medicine cabinet and took out a porcelain pillbox. He’d been supplying William pills of euphoria ever since the designer-drug maker Heikkinen came knocking on W Gallery’s door. He remembered he’d slipped William a twenty-pill pack before he left for China two weeks ago. Walters lifted the cover of the pillbox, only six left. The bastard really was having fun. He must’ve been stoned before Simone strangled him to death. He put the box back in the medicine cabinet, turned off the faucet and opened the bathroom door.

  “Well, tell me what happened.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to help me now?” Simone sounded doubtful.

  “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what happened.” The bitch is testing my patience.

  For about ten minutes Simone recounted the whole story, from how William seemed to have cared for her to how he’d brushed her aside, to why she had gone there earlier in the evening but had to leave because Gerel had been with William. Anger had blinded her when William was still uttering Gerel’s name even in his drug-induced comatose state.

  Walters listened, didn’t interrupt her, didn’t make a comment until Simone finished and began to sob again. He pulled out his cell and pretended to check a message that had just come in. He turned off the recording and thrust the phone back in his pocket.

  “I guess the crime you’ve committed is a crime of passion. I don’t think you’d be accused of murder. You didn’t plan to kill him, did you?”

  Simone shook her head vehemently.

  “I can’t believe you developed real feelings for William. You out of anybody should’ve known what he was, a playboy. He’s not capable of having real feelings for anyone,” Walters said quietly, trying to insert a tinge of empathy into his voice while his mind whirled around what he needed to do next. He thought about William’s pillbox, Heikkinen came to mind. The designer-drug maker had complained to Walters that the FBI was onto the drug ring in New York City, and the ringleader had told every member to
lay low for a while. I could make William’s death appear to be drug related. I’ll drop a few clues, so an idiot could connect the dots.

  “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll take care of everything here,” Walters said to Simone, surprised that the fake sincerity in his voice almost sounded real.

  “What are you going to do?” Simone wasn’t quite sure.

  “Trust me, we’ll be okay. Just go home and I’ll explain everything tomorrow.”

  He put one hand on Simone’s back and guided her to the bedroom door. “You said yourself we partner well, so you have to trust me.”

  Simone threw him a teary glance and descended the stairs.

  “One more thing, you didn’t come in from the front entrance, did you?” Walters was pretty sure Simone had used the private entrance where no security cameras were present for privacy reasons.

  “Of course not. I never use the front entrance, as William instructed.”

  “Good, be careful nobody sees you leaving.”

  Walters waited on the landing until the front door downstairs clicked shut.

  For a while, rumors had been circulating and eyebrows had been raising among the elite circles of Manhattan. The three musketeers of the art world were playing ménage à trois in the Crystal Palace. Each time Simone or Walters visited Blackwell at his French-crystal-encrusted penthouse, salacious blurbs dotted the tabloids in the days following without fail, accompanied sometimes by pictures showing either Simone or Walters walking through the lobby. Frankly, Walters didn’t mind the gossip—good, bad, embarrassing, titillating, so long as it generated publicity. Being associated with Britain’s richest bachelor in any way was good for him, for his gallery. Who cared what New York’s pompous hypocrites thought of him? But William seemed bothered by it, he had ordered Simone and Walters to use the private entrance to the penthouse, particularly during late hours to avoid the security cameras in the lobby. “Those bloody bastards would sell their mother for a few quid,” he’d cursed. Walters was miffed about William’s decision. But tonight Walters was glad that William had attempted to keep his sexual experiments a secret, as it just might have saved the day.

  Walters went back into the bedroom, stripped the dead body naked and pulled the tie off the bruised neck. He bundled the clothes and carried them downstairs. He took a garbage bag from the kitchen and stuffed the clothing inside, leaving it by the front door. Next, he pulled out the smallest knife from the knife rack and proceeded upstairs again.

  Sorry, buddy, hate to do this to you. The tip of the knife slashed into Blackwell’s abdomen. Didn’t the Chinese say that the penalty for betrayal was death by a thousand cuts? Which seemed to be a punishment befitting William Blackwell. The cops would surely find the drugs in the pillbox, and the décor of the penthouse spoke for itself. The deceased was obviously an enthusiast of Asian art, plus his involvement in the recent Empress Seal fanfare. Let them think that William was somehow connected to the dark world of Chinese drug rings. Didn’t Heikkinen tell Walters the FBI was onto his drug lord boss? Maybe they would think William did something that could potentially exposed the entire drug ring, so they killed him . . .

  Done. Walters hunched over the bedside and examined his handy work. One hundred small crosses were blood-tattooed on Blackwell’s pasty white body, symmetrically lined up on the torso, each arm and each leg. For a second, Walters wondered if he’d gone overboard and the results might be too dramatic. Nah, he felt good, vindicated. William had betrayed him, all because of that damned Chinese Empress Seal. Now, he had been punished the Chinese way, he’d go to his grave with a thousand cuts on his body. Each cross stood for the Chinese letter ten—ten times one hundred—one thousand. Who knows, maybe some smarty-pants FBI agent could make that connection, too.

  There was one last thing Walters had to do. He’d have to wipe down everything he had touched and run the vacuum on every inch of the floor that he and Simone could possibly have walked on.

  Chapter 21

  Normandy, France, present day

  Ryan walked up to the front door of the Hanging House. Broken balusters dangled overhead: what was left of the balcony railing. Only two days ago he’d arrived at the same spot, a few seconds before the broken railing that Wesley Walters had been hanging onto gave way. Walters’s body had tumbled down right in front of him, but Ryan wasn’t sure what it was until Gerel shined a flashlight from above. The bastard was lucky, a few feet out and he would have fallen off the cliff and sustained injuries far worse than a broken leg. He could be dead.

  He knocked on the door. It opened immediately, as if the owner had been looking out of the window and saw him walking up.

  “Bonjour,” he said, a word he had never even tried to say until now. Keep it up and he’d reach the same proficiency level as his Spanish soon.

  “Hi!” Gerel greeted him, her voice still hoarse, but with a smile he’d never seen before. It reached all the way up to her amber eyes. His eyes moved to the ugly purplish-black on her neck, just above the crew neck of her hunter green sweater.

  “How are you feeling? When did the doctors let you go?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, I’ll be fine. I feel good. Come in, please.” She stepped back to let Ryan in. “How’s Mr. Walters doing?” she asked as they walked toward the salon where a fire was glowing in the hearth.

  “Not saying much, insisting he needs a lawyer. But don’t worry, we’ve got him no matter what. Mr. Walters has been in cahoots with a drug dealer in New York City, using the W Gallery to import analog drug ingredients from China. That’s enough to take them both into custody.” Ryan stopped short. He was pretty sure that Walters was the one who killed Simone before he left for Paris. He also believed that Walters came to Paris to get the original face of the Empress Seal with the intention to kill Gerel if necessary. But how Walters thought he could get away with two murders was still an unknown. But no need to dwell on that now and no need to tell Gerel what he thought had happened. He’d have plenty of time to figure it out once he got back to New York, hauling Walters along with him.

  Gerel seemed to be relieved to know that Walters was not going to be free any time soon. “We did get in touch with the Chinese authorities. The gemologist who authenticated the Empress Seal had no idea what Mr. Walters was talking about. The gem expert said everything had checked out, the Empress Seal now laying in the Forbidden City is one hundred percent original, nothing had been altered or falsified,” said Ryan.

  “Really?” Gerel’s eyes widened.

  “Really. Strange though that Mr. Walters insisted that Mr. Blackwell had returned the seal but kept the original face for himself. And that you in turn stole it from Mr. Blackwell’s penthouse shortly before he was murdered. It’s got to be one heck of a diamond if people are willing to steal and kill for it.” Ryan threw Gerel a knowing look.

  “Detective, as I’ve told you, I didn’t intend to steal it. It was a moment of shock and weakness, I guess. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Now it’s gone. I threw it off the balcony to save my life. You were with me when I found the pouch, but the stone must’ve rolled down the cliff, or flew into the ocean, gone forever. It’s obvious that Mr. Walters came here to kill me for the diamond. Didn’t he say some mysterious Chinese bad-asses were going to kill him if he didn’t get the diamond back to them?”

  She said she’d told Ryan everything. Two nights ago, after Ryan had tied Walters’s hands with the same necktie Walters had used to try to kill Gerel, they sat and waited for the French police to arrive. Gerel had told him what she’d discovered in China about her great-grandmother Lis, about Meigui, Sarnai, and the priest Jacques. She’d told him what she read in Meigui’s manuscript. She’d told him about the history of the red diamond. “It doesn’t matter now. What happened here is all over the news. Whoever the bad-asses are, they will give up since it’s known to the world that the face of the famous and infamous Empress Seal flew over the balcony of the Hanging House, swept away by the waves of Normandy. But you never kno
w, this place could soon be stormed by tourists hunting for the world’s biggest red diamond.”

  “A raw red diamond, there’s a big difference,” Gerel laughed.

  Ryan was glad Gerel actually laughed at his humor. Less than two days ago she’d almost died a violent death.

  “Well, I’d better get going. I hope you get better soon.” Ryan got up, his hand automatically reaching for the card in the interior pocket of his jacket. “Sorry, professional habit,” he said. “I guess you don’t need another card.”

  “No, Detective, I know where to reach you if I remember anything else.” Gerel smiled again, the kind of smile that made her face extraordinarily beautiful. Ryan would never forget those amber eyes.

  Chapter 22

  New York City, present day

  “Congrats, partner.”

  Ive looked away from her desktop screen. Ryan had just walked into her cubicle carrying two giant Starbucks coffee cups, an ear-to-ear smile on his face.

  What the hell? “What’s that froufrou coffee for?” Ive tried to keep a straight face.

  “Celebration for laying the Empress Seal to rest.” Ryan handed one cup to Ive.

  “I’m not sure it’ll ever rest in peace without its original face.”

  “At least the body is resting in the Forbidden City now. And there’s something else worth celebrating.”

  “Mm . . .” Ive pried the lid off the coffee cup and took a sip. “Perfect, just the way I like it. What else are we celebrating?”