Diamonds Aren't Forever

by Connie Shelton

  She let the strands trickle between her fingers. “There you go, ladies. Less than a thousand dollars worth. Not enough to send a man to jail for ninety days.”

  “Oh, Pen, that’s awful,” said Gracie, reaching to place her arm around her friend’s shoulders.

  “I don’t understand why the museum’s leadership would risk its reputation with this,” Sandy said. “Forging appraisal documents is very serious.”

  “Perhaps that’s the very reason someone created the forgery. Someone on the inside must have switched the necklaces, so they needed documentation to back it up.”

  “Hell of a mistake, not destroying the original,” Amber said.

  “Why would they think this would fly, anyhow?” Gracie said. “The jeweler surely kept a copy. They had to know Pen most surely had another copy. Who would think they could get away with the switch?”

  “Some dweeb,” Amber said, shaking her head.

  “Or someone who knew he would never, ever be questioned.” Pen voiced her thoughts aloud. “Not a museum insider. Someone else set up the museum to be suspected of switching the necklaces, to be caught as responsible for the theft and for the false paperwork. Such a thing would be the death of a non-profit organization.”

  She thought of Stan Higgins and the near-desperate pleas for donations last night. Maybe the director knew the museum was either culpable or had been expertly framed. But who could pull off such a thing?

  Chapter 26

  Todd Wainwright felt certain he would throw up if he saw another pair of blue shoes. His mother picked up a low-heeled thing in sky blue, turned it in her hands to examine all sides, set it back. She caught the eye of a clerk and asked if they didn’t have the same shoe in a darker shade. While the girl went to ask her manager, Todd pretended his phone had buzzed, pulled it from his pocket and excused himself.

  Longing to flee the department store, the mall and the city itself, he walked out of Aggie’s earshot and stared at the display. Wishful thinking had not caused it to ring. Where the hell was Caplin?

  Todd knew Penelope Fitzpatrick had spotted the two of them talking outside the museum last night at the gala. If she’d caught even a portion of their conversation, Todd fully expected the bomb to drop at any time. He stuck the phone back in his pocket and picked another antacid from the foil-wrapped roll he always carried nowadays.

  The conversation had begun on Todd’s terms: Where’s Dick Stone and where’s my money?

  Listen, kid, you think you’re the only one wants Stone’s head in a noose? At least you got paid a little bit up front.

  You did too, right?

  Ha—if you only knew.

  What?

  Caplin had fidgeted a moment, embarrassed.

  What?

  He was short on cash that first time you met him. Talked me into coming up with the thousand dollars. Said he’d be at the bank the next day and would pay me right back. Worse, I got stuck for the cost of the forger and the grand for the fake necklace. I don’t even know those guys, and I’m the one paying for their work? Shit, if I get my hands on Stone …

  Todd had wanted to laugh. A cop being taken in by a classic I’ll-repay-you-later scam. But he didn’t dare. The lady had been all over Caplin’s case since she figured out the necklace was bogus. Now she knew of their connection … she was likely to start pestering him as well. And that old guy—the one who’d been her date that night—Caplin said the man used to be a prosecutor, still knew everyone in that end of things. If they got caught now, the lady’s friend had the power to make all their lives pretty miserable.

  The thing about the conversation that still haunted Todd, and the reason he really needed to get this thing done and finished, was what Caplin told him right at the end.

  You screwed up royally, buddy. You put the fake appraisal in the museum’s records, yes. But you forgot to take out the real one.

  I didn’t! I swear, I destroyed the real one.

  Well, they’ve got another copy of it somehow. The detective’s look had been so skeptical, Todd began to question himself. Maybe he had messed up. He’d been so nervous that night. Maybe the sheet of paper he’d fed into the shredder was something else. Oh, god, maybe he really had botched it.

  If so, he’d be lucky if they didn’t haul him to a dark alley somewhere, let alone never pay the rest of the money he was so desperately counting on.

  Caplin’s voice nagged at him: Yeah, see, you’re doubting yourself. Well, my department was only given copies of those appraisals. Your boss has the originals in a file somewhere in there, and if he ever really sits down with that file and reads everything … well, your ass is grass. Because, believe me, I’m not taking the fall for this. I’m already out a bunch of my retirement fund, but I’m not admitting to anything illegal. That’s a hundred percent on you.

  Even now, standing in a mall department store, Todd swallowed hard. Caplin would cut him no slack at all. So much for being partners.

  He glanced back toward the ladies shoe department where his mother was seated while the young clerk knelt beside a tall stack of shoeboxes. Good. She’d be there awhile. This damn shopping trip had turned into another nightmare when Aggie informed him she was buying a new outfit and shoes for his cousin’s wedding, and he was going with her.

  No wangling out of it. He’d be stuck as the single, eligible bachelor who had to dance with the homeliest of the girls and the eldest of his mother’s generation, every female who couldn’t scrounge up a date. And Iris—sheesh, she was the cousin no one ever believed would find a guy, much less a man who wanted to live with her forever. It made Todd feel even more like a loser, the last of his generation to find a partner, the failure in life.

  He paused by the jewelry counter, his eye drawn by a display of gold watches. Maybe if he showed up at the wedding sporting one of those and dressed in a terrific suit. He saw the price tag on the coolest watch and it kind of took his breath away.

  Money. Another sore subject in his life right now. Which brought his thoughts full circle to the memory of what he’d done with the thousand dollars Dick Stone had given him.

  His damn student loan had been two thousand in arrears at the time. A stupid, stupid visit to Laughing Rock Casino—one of those tribal places with terrible payout rates—hoping to double the grand and get himself caught up.

  He turned away from the watches as an eager clerk approached. At this moment, he wanted to hide in a corner and cry.

  Chapter 27

  Pen voiced her question aloud. “Who could manage to set up this whole thing—the fraudulent paperwork and the theft—while making the museum look culpable?”

  “Would a master con man do?” Amber answered without a blink.

  She closed the pages of documents on her computer screen and opened a new tab.

  “I found quite a few Richard Stones, but most of them checked out as regular, law-abiding guys.”

  A little graph appeared, obviously designed to impress the group with Amber’s abilities to ferret out information on the computer.

  “When I cross-checked them with what we knew of our Mr. Stone’s travel plans and the rental car data, that’s when it turned interesting. There was no such man. The address he provided was a fake. The driver’s license he presented agreed with the address all right. It’s just that it’s a vacant lot in Muncie, Indiana.”

  The screen flashed to a Google Earth view of—yes—a vacant lot. Thorough, Pen had to admit, although she found herself becoming a little impatient. Did Amber find their man or not?

  “Here’s the photo from the license.” She made the picture stretch until it nearly filled her screen.

  “It’s …” Pen hesitated. “It’s close. The shape of his face is right, the hairline, hair color. But his mouth is different and the nose isn’t right either. It’s not him.”

  “Close enough to pass muster with a busy rental agent or airport security, those guys who barely give a glance to be sure the names match with the rest of their docu
mentation,” Gracie said.

  “Exactly.” Amber switched to another screen. “So, I did another type of search. The security photos from the bank are next to useless but I patched them together, along with the one from the driver’s license, and I came up with this.”

  She showed another photo. Pen had to admit this one was closer to the real man’s face but it wasn’t quite right yet.

  “I ran this picture through facial recognition software.” Amber glanced around the room. “No, it’s not commercially available and, no, I didn’t really steal it from a government agency. It’s better if you don’t ask about that.”

  Pen closed her mouth. Yes, in this case it was better that she didn’t know too many details.

  “With the search parameters and the picture …” Amber’s voice trailed off as she moved images around on her screen and brought up a sort of spreadsheet. “… I narrowed it down to two possible Richard Stones.”

  Amazing, thought Pen when Amber showed the photos she’d found. The two looked very similar. She felt hard-pressed to say which was her phony private investigator. If she could see them in action, hear their voices—something like that would help.

  “One of these men lives in California, the other in Indiana. Assuming our guy would want to stick somewhat close to home—familiarity with the local places, maybe his accent, you know—I dug a little deeper into the background of the one from Indiana. Who, it just happens, reported his identity stolen about three years ago.”

  Pen felt her heartbeat quicken. It made perfect sense.

  “Did the authorities catch whoever stole the identity?” Sandy asked.

  “Well, this also gets interesting. There’s a community of gypsies in Indiana.”

  A chuckle popped forth from Gracie.

  “I know, right? How weird is that? But it’s true. Apparently a few generations back, a bunch of them came to the U.S. from eastern Europe and managed to end up in the Midwest. They tended to hang around together, I guess.”

  Pen was having a hard time wrapping her head around all this new information.

  “The gypsy community is adept at stealing—take pride in it, in fact. There are so many scams you wouldn’t believe it, even among the children. Stealing wallets is like first grade work for them. They get hold of credit cards and licenses and then sell them, barter them, sometimes even … use them.” The dramatic pause gave everyone time to figure out what Amber was telling them.

  “Our Richard Stone is a gypsy?” Pen asked.

  “It looks that way.”

  “My god,” said Sandy. “How will we ever track him down?”

  “Well—there’s good news and bad news,” Amber said. “The bad news is that Richard Stone is far from the only alias this man uses. I’ve found about a dozen so far.”

  “And the good news?”

  “I discovered his real name.” She did a couple more clicks of the mouse. “This, ladies, is Frank Morrell, Junior.”

  This time the photo was definitely her private investigator.

  “I’m impressed,” said Pen, genuinely meaning it. In a few days, Amber had got much further with her searches than the police even hoped to do.

  Gracie and Sandy seconded the kudos.

  “Of course, the question now,” said Pen, “is where on this planet is he?”

  Chapter 28

  Water, turquoise clear to the horizon, sand that looked like sugar, and a lounge chair in the shade of a couple palm trees. Life didn’t get a whole lot better than this, mused Frank Morrell. A slender twenty-something girl flounced her hot-pink bikini through his field of view and a slow smile spread across his face. She could have been the blonde twin of the brunette who’d come to his room last night. Nope, life couldn’t possibly get much better than this.

  He debated asking the blonde to put some lotion on his shoulders—always a good ploy—but she was already twenty yards down the beach. Ah well, the view was nice from this angle. He took a deep breath and enjoyed it until another girl, this one in a set of vivid yellow strings that hardly covered anything, came toward him and passed the other direction. His head followed her trail, the way a dog is distracted from one rabbit to the next.

  He thought of the money, snuggled safely in a numbered account. The million-dollar necklace he kept close. It was in a money belt under his tropical shirt. He patted the surface of it. God, he loved the Caymans. Here, you could be anyone you wanted to be. And while his Romani cousins and uncles stayed in the effing-cold Midwest and pulled insurance scams of the slip-and-fall variety, Frankie congratulated himself for graduating to a whole lot better neighborhood.

  A cloud passed in front of the sun and his mood changed. He could be happy here for another few weeks but he knew his nature. He’d become antsy pretty soon, ready for another play on some other dumb mooch. In fact, he’d already caught himself sizing up a few of them right from his lounge chair.

  The Arizona con had involved partners. Frankie didn’t much care for that, especially involving a cop, which had probably been dumb, although the guy played right in as he was supposed to, more worried about padding his retirement fund than actually catching Dick Stone. He chuckled at the recollection. How convenient one of Frankie’s seldom-used aliases fit right in with the real name of the retired cop old Caplin knew. Simple matter to have him suggest his legitimate friend’s name to the mark, that rich-bitch socialite. Neither of the partners nor the mark herself had seen old Frankie swoop in and take the whole bundle.

  But this next time he wanted something simpler, a grift he could work on his own. A chubby guy wearing oversized swim shorts in a horrendous geometric pattern walked by. Frankie noted the posture (slumpy), the gait (lackadaisical) and the expression (lost). This guy was so basic, even the Nigerian prince con would work on him. But he also probably had nothing to give away.

  This was the guy who’d taken out a second mortgage to pay for his middle-aged wife’s dream vacation. Yeah, a grifter with Frankie’s talent could probably get another mortgage out of him, no doubt raid the kids’ college fund. But Frankie wanted more than that and it wasn’t because of some stupid notion of giving the man a break. He didn’t do that shit. He’d just scored a million dollar deal; he was in the big leagues now. A rich, older lady would work for a sweetheart scam … or a businessman made a great target for The Wire or the Stock Market scam. He was looking for a certain type.

  And here he came, fifty yards away and closing. Less than handsome but not bad looking, trim physique but not muscular, short enough and nerdy enough to have insecurity issues. A real honey of a younger woman clung to his arm. She wore a diamond the size of an apple on her left hand and a half-dozen gold chains draped over her tanned, ample cleavage. Oh yeah, definite insecurity issues for this guy.

  Frankie gave a yawn and began gathering his things. Time to call it a day and go inside for a shower. The end of another sunny afternoon at the beach. In his peripheral vision, the couple came closer. He timed it perfectly to back into them as he left his lounger.

  “Hey, watch it!” the mark said. An American. Perfect.

  “Oh, sir, terribly sorry,” Frankie said effusively in his best London west-end accent. “Madam, are you all right?”

  He fussed over them, apologizing twice more for his clumsiness.

  “Well, just look where you’re going,” the man said. The woman was already smiling.

  “Let me buy you both a drink later, make up for my rudeness,” Frankie said. “Are you guests here at the hotel?”

  The mark might look a little slow but he wasn’t giving out information that easily.

  “Oh. Right. Well, I am a guest here. Woodsworth Coddington, the fourth.” It was the name he’d used to register here, although not the same one he’d given the bank. “My friends call me Woody.”

  Frankie’s smile was genuine. Last time he was Stone Dick and now he was Woody. He sometimes amazed himself with his own cleverness. “At any rate, I’ll be in the pub—er, the bar or whatever they call it
here—in about an hour. If you come in, I’m good for those drinks, I assure you.”

  The mark mirrored Frankie’s smile, while the woman showed a dimple. She’d picked up on the innuendo but probably assumed such a proper British gentlemen didn’t realize what he’d just said.

  Frankie preceded them to the lobby, where he made a show of digging his key card from the pocket of his shorts and pressing the elevator button for the upper, restricted floors. He smiled at them as the elevator door closed. The wife was whispering something into her sweetie’s ear as they watched him leave. Frankie placed a little private bet with himself. A lobster dinner if they showed at the bar. They would.

  Chapter 29

  Where is Frank Morrell? More importantly, where is my necklace? Pen pondered the questions while Amber left her computer momentarily to get herself and Gracie sodas from the fridge. She returned to her chair, took a long swig of the cola and reached for her computer mouse again.

  “Where he is, that’s a question I haven’t figured out yet. I’ve got tons of background now, though.”

  “So, let’s sift through that information and put our heads together to figure out what he would do next,” Sandy suggested. She’d given up the saggy futon for a straight-backed chair she pulled closer to the rest of the group.

  “I’ve printed a few things,” Amber said, reaching for pages near the big monitor. “Figured it would be good for each of us to memorize some of this data.”

  She handed them around. The list consisted of names:

  Known aliases of Frank Morrell:

  Frank Martin

  Martin Frank

  Richard “Dick” Stone

  Stone Barrington (this one borrowed from a fictional character)

  Stone Martin