keyboard as if he were a concert pianist about to interpret Mozart. He
hesitated and glanced sideways at Julie.
"I'll work into their systems indirectly to discourage tracebacks. I
won't damage any data or breach national security, so I probably won't
even be noticed. But if someone spys me snooping and puts a tracer on
me that I don't see or can't shake, they might pull your PI license for
this."
"I'll sacrifice myself, and take the blame. Bobby's license won't be
pulled, too, so the agency won't go down. How long will this take?"
"Four or five hours, maybe more, maybe a lot more. Can somebody bring
me lunch at noon? I'd rather eat here and take a break."
"Sure. What would you like?"
"Big Mac, double order of fries, vanilla shake."
Julie grimaced.
"How come a high-tech guy like you never heard of cholesterol?"
"Heard of it. Don't care. If we never really die, cholesterol can't
kill me. It can only move me out of this life a little sooner."
ARCHER VAN CORVAIRE cracked open the Levolor blind and peered through
the thick bulletproof glass in the front door of his Newport Beach shop.
He squinted suspiciously at Bobby and Clint, though he knew and expected
them. At last he unlocked the door and let them in.
Van Corvaire was about fifty-five but invested a lot of time and money
in the maintenance of a youthful appearance. To thwart time, he'd
undergone dermabrasion, face-lifts, and liposuction; to improve on
nature, he'd had a nose job, cheek implants, and chin restructuring. He
wore a toupee of such exquisite craftsmanship, it would have passed for
his own dyed-black hair-except that he sabotaged the illusion by
insisting on not merely a replacement but a lush, unnatural pompadour.
If he ever got into a swimming pool wearing that toupee, it would look
like the conning tower of a submarine.
After reengaging both dead bolts, he turned to Bobby.
"I never do business in the morning. I take only afternoon
appointments."
"We appreciate the exception you've made for us," Bobby said.
Van Corvaire sighed elaborately.
"Well, what is it?"
"I have a stone I'd like you to appraise for me." He squinted, which
wasn't appealing, since his eyes were already as narrow as those of a
ferret. Before his name change thirty years ago, he'd been Jim Bob
Spleener, and a friend would have told him that when he squinted
suspiciously he looked very much like a Spleener and not at all like a
van Corvaire.
"An appraisal? That's all you want?"
He led them through the small but plush salesroom: handtextured plaster
ceiling; bleached suede walls; whitewashed oak floors; custom area
carpet by Patterson, Flynn & Martin in shades of peach, pale blue and
sandstone; a modern white sofa flanked by pickled-finish, buriwood
tables by Bau; elegant rattan chairs encircling a round table with a
glass thick enough to survive a blow from a sledgehammer.
one small merchandise display case stood off to the left. Corvaire's
business was conducted entirely by appointment, his jewelry was custom
designed for the very rich and tasteful people who would find it
necessary to buy hundred-thousand dollar necklaces to wear to a
thousand-dollar-a-plate char dinner, and never grasp the irony.
The back wall was mirrored, and van Corvaire watched him self with
obvious pleasure all the way across the room. He hardly took his eyes
off his reflection until he passed through the door into the workroom.
Bobby wondered if the guy ever got so entranced by his image that he
walked smack into it. He didn't like Jim van Corvaire, but the
narcissistic creep's knowledge of gems and jewelry was often useful.
Years ago, when Dakota & Dakota Investigations was julie Dakota
Investigations, without the ampersand and the red dancy (better never
put it that way around Julie, who wouldn't appreciate the clever
wordplay but would make him eat redundancy. Bobby had helped van
Corvaire recover a fortune in unmounted diamonds stolen by a lover. Old
Bob desperately wanted his gems but didn't want the woman sent to
prison, so he went to Bobby instead of to the police That was the only
soft spot Bobby had ever seen in van vaire; in the intervening years the
jeweler no doubt had grown a callus over it too.
Bobby fished one of the marble-size red stones from his pocket. He saw
the jeweler's eyes widen.
With Clint standing to one side of him, with Bobby behind him and
looking over his shoulder, van Corvaire sat on a high stool at a
workbench and examined the rough-cut stone through a loupe. Then he put
it on the lighted glass table with a microscope and studied it with that
more powerful instrument.
"Well?" Bobby asked.
The jeweler did not respond. He rose, elbowing them out of the way, and
went to another stool, farther along the work bench. There, he used one
scale to weigh the stone and another to determine if its specific
gravity matched that of any known gems.
Finally, he moved to a third stool that was positioned in front of a
vise. From a drawer he withdrew a ring box in which three large, cut
gems lay on a square of blue velvet.
"Junk diamonds," he said.
"They look nice to me," Bobby said.
"Too many flaws."
He selected one of those stones and fixed it in the vise with a couple
of turns of the crank. Gripping the red beauty in a small pair of
pliers, he used one of its sharper edges to attempt to score the
polished facet of the diamond in the vise, pressing with considerable
effort. Then he put the pliers and red gem aside, picked up another
jeweler's loupe, leaned forward, and studied the junk diamond.
"A faint scratch," he said. "Diamond cuts diamond."
He held the red stone between thumb and forefinger, staring at it with
obvious fascination-and greed.
"Where did you get this?"
"Can't tell you," Bobby said.
"So it's just a red diamond?"
"Just? The red diamond may be the rarest most precious stone in the
world! You must let me market it for you. I have clients who'd pay
anything to have this as the centerstone of a necklace or pendant. It'll
probably be too big for a ring even after a final cut. It's huge!"
"What's it worth?" Clint asked.
"Impossible to say until it's finish-cut. Millions, certainly."
"Millions?" Bobby said doubtfully.
"It's big but not that big." Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from
the stone and looked up at Bobby.
"You don't understand. Until now, there were only seven known red
diamonds in the world. This is the eighth. And when it's cut and
polished, it'll be one of the two largest. This comes as close to
priceless as anything gets."
OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire's small shop, where heavy traffic roared
past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight
flashing off the chrome and glass, it was hard to believe that the
tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were
just
beyond the building far side of the street. In a sudden moment of
enlightenment Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly
every one else's) was like this street at this precise point in time:
all busy and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of
the herd, to achieve something and transcend the whirl of commerce,
thereby giving respite for reflection a shot at serenity-when all the
time serenity was only a step away, on the far side of the street, just
out of sight.
That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the
Pollard case was somehow a trap-or, more accurately, a squirrel cage
that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a
footing on its rotating floor.
Bobby stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling
ensnared, caged. At that moment he was not sure why, even with the
obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank's problems and
put all that he cared about at risk. He knew that the reasons he had
quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the
excitement of a wildly different kind of job-were merely justifications,
not reasons, and his true motivation was something he did not yet
understand. Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as
Clint started the engine.
"Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in that mason jar? A
hundred?"
"More. A couple hundred."
"Worth what-hundreds of millions?"
"Maybe a billion or more."
They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke. It
wasn't that no words were adequate to the situation instead, there was
too much to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.
At last Bobby said, "But you couldn't convert the stones into cash, not
quickly anyway. You'd have to dribble them onto the market over a lot
of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but
also to avoid causing a sensation by drawing unwanted attention, and
maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions."
"After they've mined diamonds for hundreds of years, over the world, and
only found seven red ones... where in the hell did Frank come up with a
jarful?"
Bobby shook his head and said nothing.
Clint reached into his pants pocket and withdrew one of the diamonds,
smaller than the specimen that Bobby had brought for Archer van
Corvaire's appraisal.
"I took this home to show it to Felina. I was going to return it to the
jar when I got to the office, but you hustled me out before I had a
chance. Now that I know what it is, I don't want it in my possession a
minute longer."
Bobby took the stone and put it in his pocket with the larger diamond.
"Thank you, Clint."
DR. DYSON MANFRED'S study, in his house in Turtle Rock, was the most
uncomfortable place Bobby had ever been. He had been happier last week,
flattened on the floor of his van, trying to avoid being chopped to bits
by automatic weapons fire than he was among Manfred's collection of
many-legged, carapaced, antenna-bristled, mandibled, and thoroughly
repulsive exotic bugs.
Repeatedly, in his peripheral vision, Bobby saw something move in one of
the many glass-covered boxes on the wall, but every time he turned to
ascertain which hideous creature was about to slip out from under the
frame, his fear proved unfounded. All of the nightmarish specimens were
pinned and motionless, lined up neatly beside one another, none missing.
He also would have sworn that he heard things skittering and slithering
inside the shallow drawers of the many cases that he knew contained more
insects, but he supposed that those sounds were every bit was imaginary
as the phantom movement glimpsed from the corners of his eyes.
Though he knew Clint to be a born stoic, Bobby was impressed by the
apparent ease with which the guy endured the creepy-crawly decor. This
was an employee he must never lose. He decided on the spot to give
Clint a significant raise in salary before the day was out.
Bobby found Dr. Manfred nearly as disquieting as his collection. The
tall, thing, long-limbed entomologist seemed to be the offspring of a
professional basketball player and one of those African stick insects
that you saw in nature films and hoped never to encounter in real life.
Manfred stood behind his desk, his chair pushed out of the way, and they
stood in front of it. Their attention was direct upon a two-foot-long,
one-foot-wide, white-enamel, inch-lab tray which occupied the center of
the desktop and over which was draped a small white towel.
"I have had no sleep since Mr. Karaghiosis brought this me last night,"
Manfred said,
"and I won't sleep much tonight either, just turning over all the
remaining questions in mind. This dissection was the most fascinating
of my care and I doubt that I'll ever again experience anything in my I
to equal it." The intensity with which Manfred spoke-and the
implication that
neither good food nor good sex, neither a beautiful sunset nor a fine
wine, could be a fraction as satisfying as ins dismemberment-gave Bobby
a queasy stomach.
He glanced at the fourth man in the room, if only to divide his
attention briefly from their bugophile host. The guy in his late
forties, as round as Manfred was angular, as pi as Manfred was pale,
with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He sat on a chair in the
corner, straining the seams of gray jogging suit, with his hands fisted
on his heavy thigh looking like a good Boston Irish fellow who had been
trying to eat his way into a career as a Sumo wrestler. The
entomologist hadn't introduced or even referred to the well-padded
server. Bobby figured that introductions would be made who Manfred was
ready. He decided not to force the issue-if on because the round man
silently regarded them with a mixture of wonder, suspicion, fear, and
intense curiosity that encouraged Bobby to believe they would not be
pleased to hear who he had to tell them when, at last, he spoke.
With long-fingered, spidery hands-which Bobby might have sprayed with
Raid if he'd had any-Dyson Manfred moved the towel from the white-enamel
tray, revealing the mains of Frank's insect. The head, a couple of the
legs,of the highly articulated pincers, and a few other unidentified
parts had been cut off and put aside. Each grisly piece rest on a soft
pad of what appeared to be cotton cloth, almost a jeweler might present
a fine gem on velvet to a prospective buyer. Bobby stared at the
plum-size head with its small reddish-blue eye, then at its two large
muddy-yellow eyes that were too similar in color to Dyson Manfred's. He
shivered. T main part of the bug was in the middle of the tray, on its
back. The exposed underside had been slit open, the outer layers of
tissue removed or folded back, and the inner workings revealed.
Using the gleaming point of a slender scalpel, which he handled with
grace and precision, the entomologist began by showing them the
> respiratory, ingestive, digestive, and excretory systems of the bug.
Manfred kept referring to the
"great art" of the biological design, but Bobby saw nothing that equaled
a painting by Matisse; in fact, the guts of the thing were even more
repellent than its exterior. One term-"polishing chamber"-struck him as
odd, but when he asked for a further explanation, Manfred only said,
"in time, in time," and went on with his lecture.
When the entomologist finished, Bobby said,
"Okay, we know how the thing ticks, so what does that tell us about it
that we might want to know? For instance, where does it come from?"
Manfred stared at him, unresponding.
Bobby said,
"The South American jungles?" Manfred's peculiar amber eyes were hard
to read, and his silence puzzling.
"Africa?" Bobby said. The entomologist's stare was beginning to make
him twitchier than he already was.
"Mr. Dakota,"
Manfred said finally,
"you're asking the wrong question. Let me ask the interesting ones for
you. What does this creature eat? Well, to put it in the simplest
terms that any layman can understand-it eats a broad spectrum of
minerals, rock, and soil. What does it ex-"
"It eats dirt?" Clint asked.
"That's an even simpler way to express it," Manfred said.
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 30