Name Dropping

by Jane Heller

You know how you can stare at something and yet you don’t see it? Really see it? Well, that’s what happened to me in that reception area at Denham and Villier. I was staring and staring and staring at the pin in the catalog, thinking this about it, thinking that about it. And all of a sudden it registered what I was staring at—an exact replica of the pin Fischer Levin had given me for Christmas.

  Duh, I thought when I made the connection. I mean, hello?

  But how was it possible? I held the photograph up to my face so I could examine it more closely. How in the world could the two pins be identical? One was worth a fortune; the other was a piece of crap.

  A second or two passed and then I had an idea how: The same way my purse could be mistaken for a Chanel original. The pin Fischer had bought me at Wal-Mart was simply a knockoff. Somebody had copied the design of the Denham pin and mass-marketed it as cheesy costume jewelry. Yes, that had to be it.

  But then why had Olga denied that she had taken Fischer to buy the pin when I’d spoken to her about it at school? Language barriers aside, she had seemed pretty convincing when she’d said she knew nothing about the pin, had seemed completely bewildered by the whole discussion.

  But if she hadn’t gone with Fischer to buy it, why had Mr. Levin told me otherwise, even relating that dopey anecdote about the receipt? Why would he make up a story like that?

  He wouldn’t, I decided. Olga had to be incorrect, forgetful, confused—or all of the above.

  I placed the catalog on my lap and took a deep breath. Where’s Bill? I thought, closing my eyes and resting my head against the back of the chair. And why is his meeting taking so long?

  As I sat there, my mind remained fixed on the pin and the puzzle it presented. It was uncanny, really. Whoever Wal-Mart’s manufacturer was had done an amazing job of copying the Denham piece—so amazing that if it hadn’t been a four-year-old kid who’d given me the pin, I might very well have sworn it was the $550,000 job. Jewelry was a blind item. Wasn’t that Bill’s motto? Because the ordinary person couldn’t tell the difference between a real diamond and a fake?

  The latter question prompted another question, a shift in my thinking, just for argument’s sake. What if Fischer’s pin were the real thing, the very same one that was pictured in the splashy Denham catalog?

  Okay, the notion was far-fetched, but what if the boy did steal it from a buried treasure chest instead of buying it at Wal-Mart? What if this so-called treasure chest was Gretchen Levin’s jewelry case and Fischer filched the pin from his own mother? Kids at Small Blessings had been known to take things from their parents’ drawers and bring them to school, without realizing that they’d done anything wrong. The previous Christmas, for example, a boy in Victoria Bittner’s class had presented her with his mother’s diaphragm—boxed and gift-wrapped.

  But if Fischer did take a half-million-dollar pin from Gretchen Levin’s jewelry case, why would Bob Levin have given me that spiel about how Fischer picked out the pin at Wal-Mart and showed him the receipt on the plane to London?

  Maybe because he was lying to me.

  I sat up straight in the chair and considered that possibility.

  Maybe the pin didn’t belong to Gretchen Levin, I thought, not that her husband couldn’t afford to buy it for her. Maybe the pin was intended for another woman—his mistress—and he’d been hiding it in a drawer until he made his ostentatious presentation. Wouldn’t that explain why he’d concocted the Wal-Mart story? So Fischer’s mommy would never have to know that he was fooling around behind her back—and that he was keeping his little chippy in diamonds?

  I was thoroughly turned off as I thought about Bob Levin, the jerk. How like him to buy a fabulously expensive bauble for some babe, who was probably even younger than his trophy wife. How absolutely revolting.

  Hold your horses, Nancy Drew Stern, I cautioned myself. If Bob Levin’s son stole a $550,000 pin out of his drawer and brought it to school as a Christmas gift for his teacher, wouldn’t the guy have asked for it back, particularly since Fischer had confessed to doing the deed? Wouldn’t Mr. Margin Call have called me, explained the situation and arranged for me to return the pin to him—discreetly? He was wealthy, but he wasn’t that wealthy. A piece of jewelry that valuable wasn’t some bad investment he could write off as a loss leader, was it?

  Of course not. There had to be a factor I was missing, and element that was escaping me.

  I continued to stew, weighing one theory against another. When I heard footsteps approaching, I glanced up, hoping it was Bill walking toward me, but it was the young sales assistant in the tweed.

  “I came to tell you,” she said with a perky smile. “The meeting has just let out. Mr. Harris should be with you in a couple of minutes.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “In the meantime, maybe you could give me some information.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, since you work here. I’m curious about a piece of jewelry featured in this catalog.” I pointed to the page on which the pin was pictured.

  “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” she said with genuine awe.

  “It is, but I was wondering—”

  We were interrupted by the insistent click click click of high-heeled shoes making their way down the hall toward us. They belonged to a humorless, harried-looking brunette in black slacks and a black cashmere sweater.

  “What’s the trouble?” the brunette said frostily, to Ms. Davis.

  This ice queen must be her boss, I thought, pitying the young woman.

  “There’s no trouble, Ms. Knapp,” said Ms. Davis. “I was just talking to a customer.”

  “A customer?” Ms. Knapp eyed me, as if I couldn’t possibly have any business in a store like Denham and Villier. After all, I wasn’t the wife of an Arab sheik or the mistress of a bonus-bloated Wall Streeter. I wasn’t even a financially secure professional woman who could afford to buy herself a diamond tennis bracelet or two. That was the problem with Denham; if you didn’t have the smell of a big spender, the personnel (excluding Ms. Davis) wasn’t especially welcoming. I’ll have to speak to Bill about that too, I thought, making another mental note.

  “I was asking Ms. Davis for some information,” I told Ms. Knapp.

  “Information? What sort of information?” she said. So snooty. I was taking up her precious time, apparently. In the seconds she’d wasted on me, she could have sold some Donald Trump wannabe a five-thousand-dollar nose hair clipper.

  “I’m very interested in a piece of jewelry from this catalog.” I showed her the page in question.

  “Ah, the catalog. How lovely.” Instantly, the snootiness was replaced by a syrupy sweetness even Fran Golden, the syrupy sweet teacher at Small Blessings, couldn’t match. It seemed that I had gone from a bothersome nobody to a discerning client in this woman’s eyes. “I’m Ms. Knapp. It would be my privilege to help. What would you like to know about the piece?”

  “Well, Ms. Knapp, if I were to purchase a brooch of this importance, I would want to be sure it couldn’t be copied.”

  “Copied?”

  “That’s right. How easily could, say, a discount store create a knockoff of the pin and then sell it to the masses?”

  “Oh, not to worry, Ms.…”

  “Stern.”

  “Ms. Stern. The brooch you’re interested in was designed for us exclusively by Marcus Grant, one of the world’s foremost jewelry designers. It’s a one-of-a-kind piece, protected by a vigorous copyright. If another retailer were to even contemplate reproducing it, we would know about it. And we would prevent it. You needn’t be concerned that you’d appear at a formal function wearing the brooch and that a member of the hostess’s staff would be wearing it too.” She chuckled. “No, there aren’t any counterfeits out there, I promise you.”

  So the pin Fischer had given me and the brooch in the catalog were one and the same? And Bob Levin’s Wal-Mart story was a total fabrication? And the supposed hunk of junk I’d asked Bill to appraise wasn’t worthless after all, even thoug
h he’d assured me it was?

  I was short of breath, suddenly. Sweating too.

  “Is everything all right, Ms. Stern?” asked Ms. Knapp.

  “Yes. Fine,” I said, struggling to pull myself together.

  “I’m delighted I could clear up that copyright matter for you,” she said. “Unfortunately—”

  “Getting back to the brooch itself,” I said, cutting her off, ignoring the awful tightening in my chest, pushing myself to continue, propelling myself toward the last conclusion in the world I wanted to come to. “You mentioned that it’s a one-of-a-kind piece.”

  “One of a kind and museum quality,” she said proudly, “because of the yellow diamond. It’s not a new piece, you know. It’s had a handful of owners, including a member of one of America’s first families of the theater.”

  I did not ask her to elaborate. I was not in the mood for celebrity trivia. I was looking for information. Hard facts. Right away. “But it found its way back to Denham and Villier?”

  “Yes. Through an estate sale. The thing is, Ms. Stern, it sounds as if you have your heart set on the brooch, but—”

  “Yes, I do have my heart set on it.” I cut her off again, feeling an overwhelming sense of urgency now, a sense of dread.

  “I understand,” she said. “It’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful pieces we’ve offered, but what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s not available at this time. We would have taken it out of the catalog but it had already gone to the printer.”

  “Not available? Why not?” I said, my anxiety level rising with her every word and gesture. If only I could stop the tape, pull the plug, shut her up, I thought miserably. But I couldn’t. I had to hear more. I needed to hear more. My future depended on it.

  “Because it’s been sold,” she said. “Now. Why don’t we leaf through the catalog and see if there aren’t other pieces that might suit your needs?”

  I shook my head. “I’m only interested in that piece.”

  “Perhaps if you would allow me to show you—”

  “No.”

  “Well.” Ms. Knapp’s big phony smile faded. “If I can’t help you, then I’ll just run along.”

  “You do that.”

  I sank into the chair as I watched her click click click back down the hall.

  Sold? I thought, trying to tie things together. The piece had been sold? When? To whom?

  “Ms. Stern?”

  It was Ms. Davis, the assistant, and she was speaking in a whisper.

  “Yes?”

  She leaned in close to me, so she wouldn’t be overheard. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the piece you wanted wasn’t sold, the way my boss said it was.”

  I sat up straighter. “It wasn’t?”

  “No. It was stolen.”

  My heart thudded. “Stolen?”

  “Yes. A couple of months ago or thereabouts. That’s why we don’t have it in the vault.”

  I was too stunned to respond.

  “Nobody’s allowed to talk about it,” she went on in a hushed tone, “but since you were so curious about it…”

  Stolen? Not in their vault? How could this be happening?

  But it was happening, I reminded myself. Had already happened. And no amount of wishful thinking on my part was going to change it.

  I had handed the pin over to Bill myself, right there in the store, a couple of months ago—the “couple of months ago” that coincided with Ms. Davis’s time line. As we’d sat together in his office, he had given me the impression that he’d never seen the pin before, didn’t acknowledge that it was a famous piece, didn’t let on that it had been owned by one of America’s first families of the theater. He’d said he would test it, to determine if it had value. And then he’d called me two days later, claiming it was made of such cheap materials it had disintegrated during the testing. That was why he’d been unable to return it to me, he’d said, because there was nothing left of it to return. And now here was Ms. Davis, in her tweed suit and eagerness to please, with an entirely different version of the truth—a version that was about to shatter my trust in the man I adored, a version that was about to destroy my happiness.

  Why did Bill tell me the pin was worthless if it wasn’t? I asked myself, my eyes brimming with tears. Why did he pretend not to recognize a piece straight out of his own catalog? Why did he hang onto it instead of giving it back to me? And, most crucially, why, oh why, did he hang onto it instead of putting it back in the vault as he should have?

  The answers were devastating, all of them.

  Because if Denham and Villier’s prized, one-of-a-kind, $550,000 brooch was not in the store where it belonged, then Bill Harris, the love of my life, was not only a liar; he was a thief.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I ran down the hall toward the elevator, Ms. Davis running after me. “What about your appointment with Mr. Harris?” she called out, obviously perplexed by my abrupt departure. “Was it something I said?”

  It was something you said, all right, but it was something he did, I thought bitterly as I kept going, kept heading for my escape.

  I cried as I rode down to the first floor and I cried as I rushed toward the store’s exit and I cried as I stepped out into the cold night. My heart was breaking.

  As I stood there on Fifth Avenue, tears pouring down my face, I felt sick, really sick to my stomach. (No, this isn’t yet another story where someone bends over and starts retching right in the middle of the street. Personally, I hate it when people throw up in public in response to hearing bad news. But a quiet queasiness is acceptable, in my opinion.) I didn’t know how to ease my pain, didn’t know where to go, where to turn. I felt as if I had to unburden myself, had to have a shoulder to lean on, had to have a sympathetic ear to help me cope with Bill’s treachery, his criminality.

  Janice, I decided, ruling out parents, shrinks, and clergy in favor of my best friend in all the world.

  I spotted a taxi and raised my arm to catch the driver’s attention. He pulled up to the curb, tires squealing. I got into the cab and gave him Janice’s address. He took off by flooring the accelerator and, in the process, nearly herniating a disk in my neck. But I didn’t care. I was so wracked with emotional pain, what was a little whiplash?

  It occurred to me as I was getting out of the cab in front of Janice’s building that I had no idea whether she’d be home. It was a Friday night, and, although she hadn’t mentioned specific plans for the evening, that didn’t guarantee that she didn’t have any.

  Please be there, I prayed as I approached her doorman. Please be there for me in my time of need.

  “Is Miss Mason in?” I asked him between sobs. I couldn’t stop crying. I had hoped the chilly air might snap me out of my hysteria, but no dice. I was too far gone.

  “Yes,” he said to my great relief. “And you are…?”

  “Nancy Stern,” I said. He was new; her other doormen would have recognized me, even with the red face and swollen eyes.

  He picked up the house phone. I heard Janice’s voice say “Yeah?” which brought on another bout of sobs.

  “Nancy’s coming up,” the doorman told her.

  “Nancy?” said Janice. I could tell she was surprised. And why not? I was supposed to be having dinner at some stupid Chinese restaurant with Bill, the cat burglar. I shuddered at the very thought of it, of him.

  I took the elevator up to Janice’s apartment. When I reached the third floor, I stepped into the hall and turned right. She was standing at her door, looking concerned.

  Just the sight of her was enough to send me into absolute paroxysms of crying. She held out her arms to me. I flew down the hall into them.

  “Nancy,” she said, hugging me. “Oh, Nance. What’s the matter, hon?”

  I couldn’t answer right away. I was too busy leaking snot onto her nice blue sweater.

  “Would you please tell me?” she demanded. “You’re scaring the hell out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I blub
bered, wiping my eyes and nose with the back of my hand. “Something’s happened.”

  “I kind of figured that,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Remember how you’re always going on about men’s neuroses?” I sniveled. “How they take a while to come out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, Bill’s finally came out.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. They came out, only they’re worse than neuroses.”

  “Worse than neuroses?”

  I nodded. “They’re criminal impulses.”

  Janice stared at me for several seconds, to make sure I wasn’t drunk or otherwise impaired. When she determined that I wasn’t, she pulled me into her apartment and closed the door behind us.

  I expected that she would be alone, that I’d be able to pour out my heart to her in private, but no. As she helped me into her living room, I was stunned to find five other women sitting there. I felt as if it were my birthday and Janice had organized a party without telling me and everybody was going to leap out of their seats and yell, “Surprise!” But they hadn’t come to a party; they had come to Janice’s for their monthly reading group and I had just burst in on it.

  “Oh. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, embarrassed and angry. Embarrassed that I had intruded on their meeting; angry that they were intruding on my misery.

  “That’s okay,” said one of the women, Linda Franzione, the one whose ex-husband had faked his own death. “We’re doing Memoirs of a Geisha. You’ve read it, haven’t you? It’s been on the best-seller list forever.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, wanting to be polite as well as wanting them to beat it. “I have read it, but—”

  “It’s a disgrace when you think of how men use women,” said Linda, just as Janice was plunking me down in a chair. “That’s what I got out of the book—how these Japanese men have an almost pathological need to dominate. Not that American men are any different, naturally. Look at Clinton. Look at all of them. As far as they’re concerned, women are put on this earth to service them.”

  As I’ve indicated, the book up for discussion was always incidental at Janice’s reading groups. What the members of the group were really interested in wasn’t exploring literary themes; it was trashing men. The difference on this particular night was that I suddenly wanted in. Why limit my audience to Janice when I can have a roomful of supporters? I realized.