by Cassie Page
Olivia drew in a loud breath. “Do you think she could have killed Jocelyn out of jealousy?”
Marguerite waved her hands to slow Olivia down. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know her and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of murder without proof. But Roger is a hot property. Some of the silly women I know who can’t deal with menopause convince themselves that a fling with someone like Roger is the secret to eternal youth. A rich older woman can be quite enticing to a workman. I hear the girls talking, that’s all. I prefer facelifts. No lying and if I ever caught Richard playing in someone else’s yard, he’d never have anything to hold over me. Write that down. It’s the secret to a long marriage.”
Olivia chuckled. “Facelifts.” But she mulled over what Marguerite had just revealed, not sure how it fit into Jocelyn Payne’s death. She responded to the last statement. “A long marriage? Right now I can’t see myself getting there. Matt refuses any contact with me. Conflict of interest.”
“Good,” said Marguerite firmly. “I’m glad to hear it. I think you two should be separated until this is solved. Then you won’t trip over one another’s feet. Which is why I don’t think you should attach yourself to Charles’s party right now. That’s why I’m officially firing you. People remember things like this, that Charles Bacon had a friend plan his party who was accused of murder.”
“I’ve only been accused in the press by Jocelyn’s husband. Oh, and in Awful Arlo’s posts.”
Marguerite cautioned her. “Olivia, people hang onto the bad stuff. When Matt and his boys figure this out and find the real culprit, people won’t remember that you were exonerated unless you remind them you were a suspect. And a lot of people are of the where there’s smoke, there’s fire school of thought. So unless you have a big finish where you catch the bad guys, are mortally wounded in the last act and die in Matt’s arms saying, it’s all right, darling, as long as justice is done . . .”
Olivia had to laugh at Marguerite’s impression of an ingénue throwing the back of her hand to her forehead in a death scene.
“ . . . stay out of the limelight. You’re going to have to let the sands of time wash some of this stink away. Sorry for being so blunt. You’ve worked hard on the museum. Be patient. There will be lots of parties to plan for Charles over the years where the press won’t be hiding in the potted palms hoping to catch you doing something incriminating.”
Marguerite stood, ending the meeting. Olivia got up and followed her to the door. Before they reached the foyer, Marguerite lifted Olivia’s chin. “Come on now, princess. Remember what brother Mick always says.”
‘I know. Something about not always getting what you want.”
“Believe it or not, Olivia, it’s the story of my life. It’s how you deal with what you can have that matters, not moping over the disappointments.”
She flung her arms out to suggest all her possessions. “All this? It came from making lemonade out of lemons.”
They reached the huge front door and Marguerite opened it, ending the pleasantries. “Olivia, it’s been real, but I have to change for my yoga session before I leave for a board meeting in the city.”
“Of course. And I have a murderer to catch.”
“That’s my girl.”
“But don’t you want to peek out the window and make sure no one is spying so they can accuse you of consorting with criminals?”
“Ha. I’d love a good libel suit. But they know better than to tangle with me.”
“That awful Arlo.”
“Olivia. My first rule of business. Don’t hate your enemies, use them. Now go, and let’s get on with the dance of life.”
On her drive home, Olivia flipped on the radio. She searched the dial for some good music while taking in Marguerite’s admission that her success had not come easily. She must remember that, she told herself, when she found a station giving a bulletin on the autopsy results for Jocelyn Payne. As Matt had said, the report showed that she died of heart failure, many hours before the fall.
Someone else had been in Xavier’s that night with Jocelyn. Olivia was sure of it. Could her champagne have been laced with a poison that caused heart failure? But common poisons often left telltale signs on the body. Odors, blistering of the skin, discoloration and so forth, even before toxicology reports confirmed the presence of a lethal substance. But the coroner had said heart failure, not possible poison.
Chapter Sixteen: A Girl’s Best Friend
Once home, Olivia ran up the stairs and called out to Tuesday, eager to tell her about the carpenter, Roger Phillips. No answer. She searched the loft, but Tuesday was not home. She tried her cell one more time, but it threw her into voicemail again.
At breakfast Tuesday had said she had to take care of some business. Olivia had a few urgent tasks of her own, so she settled down to wait for her friend in front of her laptop with a glass of iced coffee. She needed to take care of some client work, but couldn’t focus on decorating details. She was determined to find out who, exactly, had a motive to kill Jocelyn Payne.
She opened up a new document in Word and started a list:
SUSPECTS:
She eliminated the husband. He was out of town with many witnesses confirming his alibi.
Boyfriends? The list was growing.
This shouldn’t have surprised Olivia. She recalled her own reaction when she visited the late Mrs. Payne to present a bid for the closet project. After Olivia announced herself, the maid ushered her into an overstuffed living room and went searching for the lady of the house. Too much furniture in the room, Olivia had thought, all of it antique and oversized jammed into every corner of a very big room with no thought to style or design. Jocelyn was saying, we have a lot of money and this is what we can buy with it.
But the real shocker came when Jocelyn came through French doors straight from the pool. She wore a skimpy bikini, no sandals or cover-up. Her thick blond hair danced around her shoulders, and her smoky-eye makeup was worthy of a Kardashian on the red carpet. She had a body by Chrysler. Jane Chrysler, a personal trainer who only took private clients.
Chrysler arrived for her appointments with an assortment of kettle bells, medicine balls, and stretch bands. For ninety minutes she delivered her brand of legalized torture composed of Pilates, yoga, weight training and a routine she developed during her days as a drill sergeant in the Army.
Olivia kept fit with thrice-weekly runs and regular evening sessions on the mini Pilates reformer in her bedroom. But when she used a coupon for a free session with Jane Chrysler, she cried uncle half way through the workout. Jocelyn informed her in due course that she started her day with Jane Chrysler, followed by one hundred laps in her pool. Olivia was more than impressed; she was in awe of Jocelyn’s commitment to fitness.
In Olivia’s estimation, having been exposed to the finest sculpted shapes, male and female, that Los Angeles and Hollywood had to offer, Jocelyn possessed the most exquisite body she had ever seen. No wonder she had the reputation for swatting men away like flies. Except for her mega-wealthy husband, that is. How curious, she thought, Jocelyn’s husband bundled up in waterproof suits on his racing yacht, while his wife was wearing as little as possible at the pool.
What surprised Olivia was Jocelyn’s flirty behavior with her as well. She acted like a woman with a barrel full of insecurities who believed her only bankable assets were her looks and sex appeal. Didn’t she know that batting her eyelashes only worked on men? Perhaps she was so used to stirring the pot with her curves and perfect bone structure that she couldn’t turn it off, keeping her eternally entangled with men.
But even if all of Olivia’s amateur psychoanalysis was correct, how did that figure into Jocelyn’s death?
There were too many kinks in this case. A big one suddenly jumped out at her. If Jocelyn indeed had company on the night she died, and one of the parties had figured out how to get into the safe and drape the deceased with more than a million dollars in jewels, why did the killer leave them there? Why not take
the diamonds?
Xavier’s safes were state of the art. Cracking them must have taken a lot of work. Why, if the motive wasn’t robbery? The obvious answer was that the diamonds were a message. But what was being communicated?
A buzzer went off in the mystery-solving center of her brain. She remembered Xavier’s reaction to seeing the dead body covered in his jewels. He had run to the back of the shop screaming something. What was it? She thought hard and it came to her. The De Beers. Olivia hadn’t paid attention at the time because of all the confusion. Now she wondered what that meant. All she knew about De Beers was that they sold diamonds. A diamond is forever, according to their old ads showing gorgeous men giving gorgeous women the company’s trademark glittering gems.
Her mind was wandering now. How was Xavier connected to De Beers? Wouldn’t they be a competitor? The only jewelry names she knew anything about were the ones celebrities wore on the red carpet. Winston, Cartier and Tiffany, for instance. Fred Leighton, jeweler to the stars. She decided to drill a little deeper.
The name De Beers activated millions of hits when she typed it into her browser. She learned that De Beers was the name of two Afrikaner brothers who had owned a farm in South Africa in the mid-1800’s. Up until that time rubies and sapphires were the glamour gems of choice for nabobs all over the world, more rare and valuable than today’s favored ice. The prestige of the diamond engagement ring was still half a century or more away. India and Brazil produced almost all the world’s diamonds back then. India, in true locavore fashion, kept their diamonds for themselves for the most part and the pleasure of their maharajas. Some of India’s famous stones were ancient, said the report. The Koh-I-Noor, now residing in England’s Royal Crown, was speculated by some overeager storytellers to be 5,000 years old, though the earliest text mentioning the stunner only went back 800 years.
She came across the name of the richest man believed ever to have lived. Mansa Musa, emperor of prosperous East African Mali, was worth a reputed 400 billion dollars at the time of his death in 1300 or so. Olivia ran out of zeros trying to calculate what that would be worth today. She couldn’t tell if he counted any of his wealth in diamonds, but knew modern Mali, now one of the poorest of countries, could certainly use a billion or two of his treasury. The history of this King of Kings, as he was called, put the puffed up bills of Billionaire Hollow, aka Darling Valley, to shame. Olivia knew several double-digit bills lived in Darling Valley, Arthur Payne, for one, but did not believe she could claim any triple digit billionaires as neighbors.
She got her head back to diamonds, and the day that changed history. A huge diamond was found on the De Beers brothers’ property that would end India’s monopoly on precious stones. It wasn’t the first diamond ever found in Africa, nor the largest, those would appear soon enough, but the discovery set off a fevered diamond rush that continues today and put South Africa’s Kimberly mines on the map.
Like James Marshal and John Sutter who discovered gold in California roughly about the same time, it was the prospectors who came later that sniffed out quick riches and reaped the huge fortunes. In the case of the De Beers, the scoundrel Cecil Rhodes and his best buds swooped in to rape and pillage, perhaps not literally but effectively, the two most valuable resources of the country. Abundant cheap labor and endless veins of high quality diamonds.
The De Beer brothers sold their claim for a mess of porridge, which in today’s currency wouldn’t even allow them to buy one of the diamond trinkets still mined on their former land and found on the ring finger of women worldwide.
Rhodes and his brethren did the brothers the courtesy of keeping the De Beers name, but sewed up the mining rights in a thrice. Marketing geniuses, they created the De Beers cartel, which controls the world’s diamond industry to this day. Even Tiffany acquires their famous solitaires from De Beers.
The farmers’ land yielded so many diamond carats, carat being the weight of precious stones, that the new owners realized they had to turn some clever tricks if they wanted to make any money.
Relatively few diamonds are of a size, purity and color to earn the label, rare. Fewer still are called fancy, the highly prized colored diamonds, such as yellow and pink. The total weight of all precious stones comprises an infinitesimal portion of the earth’s surface. In that sense diamonds are rare. But of all the precious stones, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and the like, diamonds are the most common. Not as widespread as sand on the shore, but today diamonds are found all over the world and under the seas.
De Beers realized that if all the diamonds they mined were dumped on the market at once, they would not be worthless, exactly. But they might command a few dollars a carat, give or take a hundred, rather than the many thousands De Beers intended to charge their customers. What were they to do with their enormous cache? Simple. Mother Nature may have created diamonds out of carbon, heat, time and millions of pounds of pressure per square inch. But De Beers made them rare.
Unlike rubies, emeralds and sapphires, diamonds aren’t rare because so few of them exist; they are rare because De Beers never allows very many of them to reach the marketplace. They began stockpiling their enormous cache of diamonds and dribble them to wholesalers in Antwerp and other diamond buying centers in such small quantities that even today dealers clamor for them, paying whatever De Beers asks, love struck boys paying even more down the line to win the hearts of their beloveds.
Not only did the De Beers cartel start out by carefully controlling supply, which in turn created a feverish demand, but they devised a marketing campaign that equated diamonds with love.
A suitor might get the girl’s attention with his excellent gene pool, looks, wallet and wit, but he was sent packing if he couldn’t seal the deal with a nice, sparkly rock for her ring finger. After all, why was it called a ring finger? To hold a nice sparkly rock by De Beers. After all, as De Beers famously said, a diamond is forever.
Olivia thought of her grandmother’s engagement ring, now resting in her safe deposit box in Sonia’s bank. Her grandfather had De Beers to thank for the extra two years it took him to save up the money for the ring before he could ask for his beloved’s hand.
Some of this history Olivia knew, some she didn’t. All of it resonated with the memory of Coroner Ritter’s scorn for diamonds. She realized now, the cranky man knew his lapidary history. Olivia’s research explained why Xavier did so well with his gems. But it didn’t explain why he had cried, The De Beers after the discovery of Jocelyn Payne’s jewel-strewn body. He had made it sound as though De Beers were a thing, not a company.
Olivia was about to close her laptop when she noticed another entry. World’s Biggest Diamonds. Out of curiosity, after all, she liked diamonds as well as any red-blooded female, she clicked on the link. On the new page she discovered that The De Beers was actually a very large, yellow diamond discovered in the late 1800’s in one of the De Beers Kimberly mines.
Eventually a powerful Indian prince, the Maharaja of Patiala, a state in what is now the Punjab purchased it. He commissioned Cartier to design a gi-normous necklace for him to wear on ceremonial occasions, with the exquisite stone as the centerpiece. Olivia studied a 1928 portrait of the prince adorned with his treasure, possibly the most valuable piece of jewelry ever created. More than 2,700 lesser diamonds and rubies surrounded the De Beers showpiece.
“Hmm,” Olivia mused. The most valuable necklace ever created comes from Punjab, Matt’s ancestral home. Was big jewelry important to him? That could be fun. She’d have to ask him about that. If she ever spoke to him again.
He had never mentioned the Maharaja of Patiala. Apparently the monarch was quite powerful in India and Europe in the early twentieth century. The necklace created by Cartier disappeared after India’s convulsions following its independence in 1947. Bizarrely, it was found in a second hand jewelry store in London decades later, missing the massive De Beers stone and many of its siblings. Cartier had tried to recreate the necklace with synthetic diamonds but with
limited success. Yet, Olivia learned that, befitting a rock star, the downgraded necklace occasionally went on world tours to museums and galleries.
Conflicting stories claimed the centerpiece 200-plus carat stone had reappeared and was bought at auction by an anonymous buyer in the nineties. Other reports suggested the De Beers stone had never been found.
As Olivia continued reading, she learned about the jewels of India, the largest, most sumptuous collections containing gems mined in India and Columbia before the discovery of South Africa’s riches. The jewels of Nizam Hyderabad in particular captured her attention. Once owned by the richest and possibly most eccentric man of his time, the Osman Ali Khan, he kept a diamond the size of an ostrich egg on his desk as a paperweight and hummed I’m forever blowing bubbles as he cavorted around his palaces with his hundred or so wives and mistresses. His treasures were looted during the 1947 wars and much of his collection was sold on the streets for pennies, many important stones disappearing forever.
All this was interesting, but it didn’t help Olivia understand what, if anything, the De Beers diamond had to do with Xavier and Jocelyn. Rather than wrack her brain trying to figure that one out, she called the one man who would know.
Xavier exploded when she detailed the reason for the call. “What do you mean, I shouted De Beers? I never said any such thing.”
Olivia dropped her head in her hand. “Xavier, please don’t do this to me. Either I heard you or I am seriously losing brain cells at an alarming rate.”
“My dear friend,” the jeweler said, barely concealing his irritation. “That was a very traumatic experience for all of us. I may have wandered around the shop in a fog just trying to get away from the body. But speak about De Beers? Why would I? I’m small potatoes. Trust me, Olivia. De Beers may take Lawrence Graff’s calls, but not mine. You’re mistaken.”