by Jane Heller
“Nancy has something she’d like to get off her chest,” Janice told the other women, sensing my need to vent. “And it’s not about the book; it’s about her boyfriend.”
The five women laid down their copies of Memoirs of a Geisha. “We’re all ears,” one of them said, while the others nodded.
I reached into my purse for a tissue, gave my nose a good blow, and began.
I told them how Bill had been irate when he’d learned that I wasn’t the Nancy Stern I’d pretended to be, even after I’d explained to him why I’d pretended to be someone else.
“So judgmental,” everybody responded in unison.
I told them how he’d claimed to be devastated by his wife’s infidelity and given me this big speech about truth and honesty and trust and how important they were in a relationship.
“Her infidelity was probably his fault,” everybody responded in unison.
I told them how I’d believed in him, how I’d believed he could do no wrong, how I’d hoped to become his wife and the stepmother to his two sons.
“So he’s in the market for a slave, like the rest of them,” everybody responded in unison.
Between my telling and their responding in unison, I felt like I was Odysseus and they were the Greek chorus. Or, to put it in a musical context, I felt like I was Diana Ross and they were the Supremes. Whatever.
I wound up the story by telling them about the pin and how Bill had deceived me about its worth, deceived me about why he couldn’t return it to me, and then deceived his own employer by actually stealing it instead of putting it back in the store’s vault.
“The guy’s a crook?” everybody responded in unison.
“Apparently.” I was sobbing in earnest now. Janice got up from her chair to comfort me. “And I thought he didn’t have a phony bone in his body. I was a complete fool,” I said, then asked if anybody had a tissue. I was all out. Several of the women handed me some. The kind with the lotion built right in.
“You weren’t the only one he fooled,” said Janice. “I thought he was pretty special too. He had real charm, a lot of class. Not the type you’d figure for a jewel thief.”
“Oh no?” Linda Franzione piped up. “What about Cary Grant in that movie with Grace Kelly? He stole jewelry on the Riviera and he was as charming and classy as it gets.”
“I hate him,” I said.
“Cary Grant?” said Linda Franzione.
“No. Bill,” I said. “I hate him.”
“I hate him too,” said Linda.
“Me, too,” said everybody else, not in unison but practically.
“I think it’s a given that we hate him,” said Janice. “What’s not clear is what we’re going to do about him.”
“Do?” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with him ever again.”
“What I mean is, he’s a criminal, Nancy,” she said, “and criminals have to be dealt with. The minute he talks to that saleswoman who spilled the beans about the pin and saw you run out of the store, he’s gonna know you know. He’s gonna come after you. Maybe to silence you.”
Everyone gasped, including me.
“You’re saying Bill might harm me?” I asked, my anger and hurt turning to panic.
“I’m saying I wouldn’t bet against it,” Janice replied.
The seven of us sat there, speculating, for another hour or so. Memoirs of a Geisha was not mentioned. At nine o’clock, there was a knock at Janice’s door. We all jumped.
“See who it is,” I whispered to her.
“Who is it?” she called out to the person.
“It’s Bill, Janice. Is Nancy there with you?”
Everyone gasped again, especially me.
“How did you get up here without the doorman noticing?” Janice shouted. “Nobody buzzed me.”
“The doorman was outside having a cigarette,” he said. “Now, just tell me, is Nancy in there? I have to talk to her.”
“Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you,” Janice answered, before I had a chance to.
“Please, Janice,” he said. “This is important. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”
“Oh, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding all right,” said Janice. “Nancy thought you were a paragon of virtue and it turns out you’re a common criminal.”
“No, Janice. I’m not a criminal,” said Bill. “If you’d let me in I could explain everything.”
She looked over at me. I shook my head.
“No way,” she told him.
“I’m not leaving,” he said and demonstrated this by continuing to knock on the door.
“He’s giving me a headache,” one of the women complained. “Tell him to cut out the knocking.”
“Cut out the knocking,” Janice yelled to him.
“I will—if you’ll let me speak to Nancy. Please, Janice,” he pleaded.
She looked over at me again. I shook my head again.
“She’s not in a speaking mood,” Janice told him. “She wants you to get away from the door, get out of this building, get out of her life.”
“I’m sure she does, but that’s because she doesn’t know the truth,” said Bill. “I’ve got to talk to her, Janice. Make her understand.”
“Understand what?” Janice challenged.
“That she’s in danger,” said Bill.
“Sure, she’s in danger. Because of you,” Janice snapped.
“Listen to me, Janice,” Bill persisted. “I’m not the one who’s out to get her. I only want to protect her. So if you care about your friend, if you care about her well-being, you’ll let me in.”
Janice looked over at me a third time, but I couldn’t make the decision; I was too close to the situation. So I solicited the opinions of the other women in the room. After a few minutes, we reached a consensus: We would let Bill in and he could explain himself to all of us. He wouldn’t dare kill off the entire membership of a book group, would he? No, we figured. That would be too heinous a crime even for him. Besides, there was safety in numbers, wasn’t there?
Bravely, Janice went to the door and opened it. “In there,” she said, pointing inside the apartment, letting him go first so she wouldn’t have to turn her back to him.
Bill hurried into the living room. His eyebrows arched in surprise when he saw that I had company—a veritable phalanx of females.
“You bastard,” Linda Franzione hissed, before he knew what hit him.
“You dirtbag,” another woman chimed in.
“You rotting sack of shit,” volunteered a third.
“I thank you all for your comments,” said Bill, recovering, “but do you think I could speak to Nancy alone?”
“No!” everybody responded in unison, the Supremes back for an encore.
God, he still looks good to me, I thought, wishing he didn’t. He still appeals to me, still makes my pulse quicken the minute he walks into a room, still gets to me. I started to cry again when this dawned on me, just buried my head in my hands and bawled.
“Nancy, don’t,” Bill murmured, moving toward me.
I picked my head up and glared at him. “If you take another step, buster, I’m dialing 911!”
He seemed not to take my threat seriously and kept coming toward me.
“I mean it!” I warned him. “If you don’t stop right where you are, I’m calling the police!”
“I am the police,” he said, having made it over to my chair, his six-foot-four-inch frame towering over me.
“Sure you’re the police,” Janice scoffed. “Tell us another one, asshole.”
“Actually, I was the police,” he corrected himself. “I’m a private investigator now.”
“A private dick, you mean,” Linda Franzione snorted.
“Exactly,” said Bill.
“Prove it,” said Linda.
Bill fished inside the jacket of his dark gray suit and pulled out his wallet. When he’d retrieved his private investigator’s license, he held it up for everyone in the room to see�
��a grown-up show-and-tell.
“I really would like to talk to Nancy alone,” he said, breaking the hush that had descended on the room. He turned to me. “I have a lot of explaining to do.”
I was a wreck at this point, dazed and confused as they say. How could Bill be a private investigator when he was a manager at Denham and Villier? And what had he meant when he’d said I was in danger?
“Nancy?” he asked again.
“I’ll let you explain under one condition,” I said.
“Name it,” said Bill.
“That Janice is there.”
He shook his head. “Some of what I have to tell you is confidential.”
“Janice can keep a secret,” I said. “Maybe not as well as you, Bill, but well enough.” I put some extra sting in the word secret in case he didn’t get how pissed off at him I was.
“Fine,” he said. “Janice stays. The rest of you ladies go. Now.”
There was a lot of grumbling and name calling and finger pointing, but the five members of Janice’s book group finally got up and left, taking their Memoirs of a Geishas with them.
“Okay,” I said when the three of us were alone. “Start talking, Bill.”
He pulled up a chair next to mine, sat in it, and reached for my hand. I batted him away. “I said talk.”
He nodded. “First, I want to say how sorry I am that I couldn’t tell you the truth about my job.”
“Your job as a jeweler or your job as a private investigator?” I asked accusingly. I still didn’t believe a word this creep was saying.
“My job as a private investigator. I’ve been undercover, Nancy. I couldn’t exactly go around handing out business cards.”
“So you weren’t lying when you told me your father and brother were cops, but you were lying when you told me you weren’t?”
“Right. I was a Washington Metro cop for thirteen years, the last six as a detective.”
“A detective,” said Janice, who was standing over Bill, watching his every move. “How macho.”
“During those six years,” Bill went on, ignoring her sarcasm, “I investigated gem thefts, among other things. That’s how I learned about jewelry, became a specialist in it, got the department to send me to the GIA in California so I could learn more about it. Eventually, though, I got burned out from being on the force, and I quit, retired, picked up my pension and walked. A week later, I got a call from the Denham and Villier store in D.C.”
“Oh, goodie,” I said. “This must be the part where your lying really kicks in.”
Bill tried to touch me again. I edged my chair away from him.
“Denham had been having its share of thefts,” he said, plowing ahead, “and the MO was always the same. A guy claiming to be the representative for some rich joker would come into the store and ask the manager to put together a presentation of four or five pieces and bring them to his boss’s home or office or wherever he was most comfortable doing business.”
“You did say that Denham made house calls,” I remembered.
“They have to,” said Bill. “When you’ve got a client that’s willing to spend a million dollars on a necklace, you’d better cater to him. The problem is, you send the pieces to the client’s house with a salesman and a setter and a polisher—a security guard, too—and every now and then the so-called client turns out to be a member of a gang of very clever gem thieves. The pieces are stolen, the personnel from the store are bound and gagged, and the company is out of valuable merchandise. What’s more, their insurance rates go sky high. So they hire people like me to catch the bad guys.”
“Why don’t they just bring in the police?” I asked.
“Because the minute you bring in the police, you also bring in the media—and the attendant negative publicity. Retailers like Denham are all about discretion. They have a policy of keeping thefts quiet.”
I suddenly thought back to Bill’s son Peter’s words that day in my kitchen. My mom is mad about the kind of life Dad has, about what he does. If it were true that Bill put himself in danger on a regular basis, the remark made sense. Because if I were married to a man whose job it was to catch crooks, I wouldn’t be so crazy about it either.
“So Denham hired me as their private security investigator,” said Bill, picking up the story. “My first job there was to pose as the manager in the D.C. store, to track the specific gang that was hitting them and then haul the whole bunch of them in. I guess I did a good job, because the New York store called me about eight months ago to help them out. And here I am.”
“Here you are,” I said. “Sounds like the basis for a nifty TV series. But you haven’t explained why you told me the pin I got for Christmas from the boy in my class was worthless. According to your Ms. Knapp, it’s anything but.”
He sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day you brought that brooch in. I almost had a heart attack.”
“A very subtle heart attack,” I said with attitude. “You barely blinked when you saw it.”
“What was I supposed to do? Jump up and down and say: ‘Well, well. If it isn’t Denham’s one-of-a-kind, half-million-dollar piece’? That brooch had been stolen a month or so before, Nancy—the way I just told you the other Denham pieces had been stolen. I’d been tearing my hair out trying to get a lead on the case, but I wasn’t about to tell you that.”
“Why not?” I said.
“For starters, I couldn’t admit I was working undercover. And number two, I had no idea where you’d gotten the brooch. All I knew about you, my sweet, was that you’d pretended to be your neighbor, the celebrity journalist. I didn’t have a clue what your real story was, if you recall.”
“What I recall is that you made me feel like a horrible liar over the other Nancy Stern thing. And now I find out that you’re the horrible liar. How about that!”
“Come on,” said Bill. “I had to conceal the truth from you. Especially after Janice told me you’d gotten the brooch from Bob Levin’s kid. I had my lead, finally, and I wasn’t about to blow it.”
I felt my throat close up, my mouth go dry. “Your lead?” I croaked out the words. “Are you saying that you suspect Fischer Levin’s father of being part of this gang you keep talking about?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Thanks to both of you”—he nodded at Janice and me—“Mr. Levin is now under surveillance. It’s just a matter of time before I nail everybody in his organization.”
Janice and I exchanged glances. We hadn’t been Bob Levin’s biggest fans, but we’d never suspected him of being a jewel thief.
“Why would a successful Wall Street guy steal jewelry?” she asked.
Bill shrugged. “Maybe he does it for sport. Maybe he does it to keep up appearances, because he and his wife are living beyond their means. Who knows? But he’s in on these thefts. The brooch proves it.”
I thought of Fischer then, of how crushed he would be if his father were convicted and sent to prison. There were no winners here.
“If you’re convinced that Bob Levin is a jewel thief,” I said, “why don’t you turn him over to the cops and have them arrest him?”
“Because they’d only get him,” said Bill. “I want all of them, everyone who works with him. That’s why I’m keeping up the surveillance on him and keeping my eye on you, Nancy. I was hoping to trap the whole nest. That was the plan, anyway.”
I stared at him, wondering if I’d heard him correctly. “The plan?”
“That’s right.”
My face burned. I was hot with fury. “Let me get this straight,” I said, my eyes narrowing with rage. “I was just part of some plan, some strategy of yours for catching a bunch of thugs?” My mind flashed back over the previous six months, to the loving, intimate moments Bill and I had shared. Suddenly, I was viewing them in a decidedly different light. Had I, in fact, been his prop, his tool, someone who had access to Bob Levin and was, therefore, useful to him? Had he only stayed close to me in order to stay close to Levin? Was
our relationship a lie like everything else?
“I love you, Nancy,” said Bill. “Whatever else you believe about me, believe that.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
“I’ll second that,” said Janice.
Bill remained undaunted. “I love you,” he repeated. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have busted in here and faced the wrath of seven women.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said again, in case he didn’t get it.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I’ve got to protect you.”
“Nancy’s a big girl,” said Janice. “Why would she need protecting?”
“Because her apartment was broken into and her purse was stolen,” said Bill, his expression dead serious now. “And they were not acts of random violence, in my opinion. Neither was her neighbor’s murder.”
I grabbed for Janice’s hand. “What are you saying?” I asked, my voice trembling, not with rage but with fear.
“I’m saying that you, not the Nancy Stern in 24A, were the one they were after,” Bill said slowly, drawing out every word, so there was no possible way either Janice or I could misunderstand him. “Fischer told his father he gave his teacher the brooch. His father phoned one of his goons and ordered him to get the brooch back. He had the guy ransack the apartment of Nancy Stern at 137 East Seventy-first Street, and he didn’t care whether or not she was present during the ransacking. The goon hit her place, not yours, Nancy. He made a mistake.”
A mistake. This revelation took a while to sink in. I required water, then a couple of scotches, then a nap on Janice’s bed before I could even process it.
It was not simply that it was a shock; it was that it was the height of irony. After I had received phone calls and letters and flowers that were meant for the other Nancy Stern, the murder, it turned out, was meant for me.
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Three