by Sean Dexter
Malloy stepped into the room and gave a long whistle. “You know how to pick ‘em, Donnelly. What the hell happened here?”
I gave him a quick run-down on the matter, but since I didn’t know anything, that only took a few minutes. Malloy took a look around the room, but he didn’t come up with anything more than I had. The room was clean. No prints, no bloody footsteps, nothing.
There was one clue. An empty cash box lay on the floor and two rubber bands. It was unusual to see those any more. The war office had confiscated most of the rubber we could use and left us with staples and paperclips. The box was empty of course. Whoever had killed Anderson looked to scram with the contents. With my investigation, I had to think that Anderson had stashed the diamond in the cash box and hidden it somewhere in the place. Maybe an accomplice had killed him and taken the ice for himself. There was no honor among thieves and precious little in the police department.
The boys on the force had already written the robbery off as solved. Anderson had done it and been bumped off for the diamond. Sure they now had a murder to solve, but I’d done the job I’d been asked to do. I still didn’t know how he pulled off the job. A conspirator would have made the heist that much easier. One could have kept Mrs. Van Hoskins occupied with wine and cheap flattery while the other made off with the jewels. Van Hoskins would have bought the lines of someone like Anderson faster than a war bond.
So now all I had to do was figure out who was the accomplice. Mrs. Van Hoskins has left me with two more names. The first was Agatha Day. The old woman was something of a tradition in racing. No one seemed to remember who she was or how she’d made her entrance into racing society, but once in, she’d stayed with a vengeance. The old woman had to be eighty-five if she was a day and was still as sharp as a tack. I only hoped that my remaining body parts would be in this good shape at her age.
Day answered the door when I knocked. No servants here or fancy meetings for drinks. She gave me a throaty laugh as I told her why I had come to see her. Not that she minded company. “I hate sitting around all the time these days, son. I seem to have outlived my contemporaries. The world is changing, and I wouldn’t mind getting off.”
I nodded and accepted her offer of tea. I would have preferred something stronger, but she didn’t seem the type to offer liquor before teatime. And she didn’t seem like the sort to steal diamonds, though she enjoyed the thought of being a suspect. “I’ve seen a lot in my time. Men flying, two world wars, but I’ve never been accused of being a thief before. Are you going to give me the third degree or beat a confession out of me?”
I shook my head, and tried to hide a smile. “No ma’am. No such thing. I just need to ask you a few questions. Do you remember the necklace?”
“Sure, I do. That woman has more jewels than sense for sure.” A cough racked the old woman’s body, but that didn’t stop her from finishing the thought as soon as Miss Day stopped. “If you can believe it, there’s a million dollar necklace and she can’t even buy a decent clasp for the fool thing.” She tugged at the choker around her own neck. “I got this at Woolworth and it’s strong as a rope.”
I looked at the necklace and had to agree that she was right. Nothing weak about that chain. I wondered why Mrs. Van Hoskins wouldn’t have invested in a good clasp. Had someone played with the necklace before the party to give them a chance to swipe the jewels? It seemed like a logical possibility. I wonder if Miranda had been invited to visit the Van Hoskins’ estate before the party to give her a chance to tamper with the necklace, but if that was the case, why not just take it then? Why go through the elaborate charade of taking it at the party? I decided that the broken clasp had just been a fortunate break for the thief.
I told Miss Day about the murder and she relished every detail. “Well, I’ll be. I’ve never been involved in a murder before. Is it like those little pocket books they have out?”
I shook my head. “The police seem to think that it was a falling out among the thieves. Though from what I’ve heard, it could have been a jealous boyfriend or husband.”
“Do you mean like Mr. Van Hoskins?” I started, but Miss Day pretended to look at the window and May’s early sun. I didn’t think that I’d learn much more from her, no matter what she knew, so I said my good-byes and went to my final interview.
The last person on the list was none other than Mr. Derby himself, Colonel Matt Winn. I had a hard time seeing the guy who was behind all the recent improvements at the Derby stealing a jewel. But stranger things had happened. I’d heard rumors that 1944 might be the last year for the Derby if we didn’t win the war. The shortages and the travel restrictions were catching up with America and I’d heard grumbling that Roosevelt was going to ban horse racing if things didn’t pick up soon. As it was, we were down to a “Street Car Derby” since only people who were in the area could come to see it. That only left sixty odd thousand people who might want to help themselves to a few hundred thousand in hot jewels.
I’d seen the colonel a million times in the paper. Hell, who could go a May without seeing him all over? Still I’d never met him. He was a tall dapper man with white hair and a sophisticated air about him. I just couldn’t see him sneaking down a hallway to heist a jewel. I’d seen too many criminals. I could usually tell just by looking at one of them.
The colonel was polite, but couldn’t add much. Yes, he remembered the party. He remembered the necklace, but he couldn’t tell me much. Or so he said. I was beginning to doubt the word of everyone in town at this point. No one seemed to know a thing about the theft. I didn’t even bother to ask about the murder.
That left me with a missing necklace, a dead man, and no answers. I tried to think like a killer, but that only brought back memories of the war. I’d ended up being the victim and not the killer. So that didn’t seem to buy me much insight.
I made a few phone calls to find out about the Van Hoskins’ financial condition, but they seemed sound as a rock. No reason for her not to buy a decent clasp for her necklace or pay a spud like me to find it.
I had started to see a pattern when Mrs. Van Hoskins called. I agreed to visit her later and give her an update on the case, such as it was.
I drove up the bluffs again. Some folks never got up here and I’d visited twice in a week. I got to the estate and took the steps two at a time. I wanted to get this interview over with and see if I could earn a fee. I didn’t think I’d be making much from this case, even with the good intentions of my buddies on the force.
Mrs. Van Hoskins answered the door again today. I was wondering if she was practicing for when there were servant rations or if she didn’t want to be overheard. I entered behind her and followed her to the study. She’d lit a fire today and she sat down without offering me a chair. I decided to stand.
“Have you found out anything?” Today Mrs. Van H wore what my wife would have called a negligee. I just called it disgusting. Feathers covered the folds of flesh around her neck, but the dressing gown was pulled tightly around her ample décolletage, as she would have phrased it.
I nodded. “I have. Mark Anderson was murdered. The police contacted you?” We hadn’t made it past the entryway again. I was only allowed as far as the foyer, even though I had the solution to the problem. I’m surprised she hadn’t made me go to the servants’ entrance.
“Yes, that’s awful. I don’t know what to think. Was he killed for my diamond? Thieves falling out the police said” Her eyes glittered as she spoke. She seemed entranced by the danger that had come into her life. I doubt that Mr. Van Hoskins provided her with much in the way of excitement. Most likely, he provided the dough and left her to her own amusements.
“He was killed for your diamond, Mrs. Van H, but not in the way that you mean.”
Her face gave everything away before I said a word. She might have been a socialite, but she could never have played poker. “I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.”
“Mark Anderson wanted something from you, but not the dia
mond. It would have been too hard to sell. He wanted cash and you had a diamond.” I looked around the room. She could have easily paid off a blackmailer, but I wondered how close Mr. Van H held the purse strings. Some dames never saw a penny of their husband’s dough.
Her eyes widened and her mouth drooped at the corners. “I could never sell the Derby Diamond. It’s been in my family for almost seventy years.”
“I know. The diamond was never stolen. You just used that as an excuse to have me investigate Anderson. It gave a motive for his murder and convenient people to look for – the missing accomplices. Who else besides you could have known the clasp would break and that you’d have to remove the necklace. The one time a year that you wore it in public. It was just a tad too convenient all along.”
“I can assure you that no such thing happened.” Her cheeks were still that rouged red, but the pallor of her skin had gone deathly white.
I stood up and started toward the door. “Well, even here there are only so many places to hide a diamond necklace like that. The police shouldn’t have too much problem finding it.”
I left her sitting on the floor, crying, but I didn’t feel too sorry for her. She’d have plenty of new clothes in prison.
*****
Jeffrey Marks is a long-time mystery fan and freelancer. After numerous mystery author profiles, he chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice. That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction. His works include Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and a biography of mystery author and critic Anthony Boucher entitled Anthony Boucher. It was nominated for an Agatha and fittingly, won an Anthony. He is the long-time moderator of MurderMustAdvertise, an on-line discussion group dedicated to book marketing and public relations. He is the author of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel, the only how-to book for promoting genre fiction. His work has won a number of awards including the Barnes and Noble Prize and he was nominated for a Maxwell award (DWAA), an Edgar (MWA), three Agathas (Malice Domestic), two Macavity awards, and three Anthony awards (Bouchercon). Today, he writes from his home in Cincinnati, which he shares with his partner and two dogs.
Gypsy's Kiss
by
Jim Winter
Jim Winter contacted me years ago, telling me he enjoyed my Noah Milano stories. I started to follow his work as he followed mine and have been pleased about the way his writing developed. His Nick Kepler is probably at least as well-known as my Noah Milano these days. In this Kepler story the Cleveland PI agrees to be the final client of a hooker named Gypsy… But if you know Nick Kepler you know trouble is bound to follow.
Gypsy and I made our date for one Friday night in November of 2002. She would come to my place and make dinner. I would buy a bottle of wine, light candles, and put on some Motown soul, this last a compromise. She didn’t like blues, and I didn’t like modern R&B. We did love us the Marvin Gaye. That, in turn would lead us to the bedroom.
Once I paid her. After all, Gypsy was a call girl. I was to be her last client ever.
I kept the first dollar I ever made as a PI framed in my office. She decided that would be the last dollar she ever made. After all we’d gone through over the years, how could I say no to a deal like that?
Around 7 PM, I had Marvin Gaye crooning on the speakers, a bottle of Riesling on ice, candles going throughout the apartment, and the framed dollar lying on the bed. My cell bleeped out Beethoven’s Ninth. It was Gypsy.
“Hello,” I said, expecting to hear she was running a little late and maybe a request to wear something besides Aramis. “Ready for our big evening?”
“Nick?” Gypsy’s voice had something in it I had not heard in a long time: fear.
“Gypsy? What’s wrong?”
“Someone broke into my house. They trashed the place.”
By the time I hung up, I was already speeding up Columbia Road toward Rocky River, where Gypsy lived.
*****
The inside of Gypsy’s condo looked like a war zone. She sat crying in a kitchen chair, her sofa and furniture slashed, dishes and glasses shattered. Tall, dark brown, and a little curvy, she looked different now, her usual grace and poise gone. Instead, she looked like the frightened, smack-addicted hooker I’d recruited as an informant eight years earlier.
“Gyps?”
When she saw me, she leapt from her chair and threw her arms around me. “God, Nick, I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I said. “Who did this to you?”
“This isn’t the worst of it,” she said. “Go look in the bedroom.”
I looked. Her clothes were strewn all over the place, dresser drawers pulled out and upended. Her attacker had left a present in the middle of her bed, a large, wet turd. I’d seen worse, but that made me want to throw up.
“Who are you?”
The voice, female, sounded like a few cops I’d known over the years, and at least one gym teacher. I spun and saw her, tall and blonde, her eyes ice blue. If looks could kill… Well, you know how that goes.
“I’m Nick Kepler,” I said. “Who are you?”
Gypsy appeared behind her, trying to compose herself. “It’s okay, Nick. She’s with me.”
“I’m a client,” the woman snapped.
“Former client,” Gypsy corrected, clearly not to the woman’s delight. “Nick, this is Jane. She’s been one of my best clients over the years.” She slipped an arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “She’s also a pretty good friend. Just like you.”
I nodded. “Tell me what happened?”
Gypsy gave me the short version. She had spent the day meeting with her lawyer and her business manager, finalizing her transition to a legitimate business woman. She had planned to stop at home to change clothes before heading to my place when she found the place trashed.
“Any ideas who did it?” I asked.
“Corbin,” said Jane. “That little fuck can’t take no for an answer.”
“Corbin?” I asked. I only knew a couple of Gypsy’s clients, and only because they had become my clients over the years. “Who’s he?”
“Owns a software company,” said Gypsy. She smiled. “I used to like my sessions with him. It was like teaching a teenaged boy how to make love.”
“How old is he?” I said.
“Twenty-nine,” said Jane. “Disgusting creature. Are you going to do anything about this?”
Gypsy put herself between me and Jane, whose left eye was now twitching. “Honey, Nick’s a very important friend of mine. Could you give us a minute?”
Jane chewed her lower lip then went into the other room.
Gypsy slipped her arms around me and kissed me. “I need to make a change to our deal.”
“Gypsy,” I said, “how could you think about that at a time like this? One of your clients is psycho, and you still want to talk about turning a trick for me?”
She traced her finger down my chest. “Nick, I’m sleeping with you for only a dollar. Do you really think I’m turning a trick?” She kissed me again. “I’m thanking you. For all you’ve done.”
I ran my own finger against her shoulder where I knew her scar to be. “You thanked me when you took that bullet.”
“You got me off heroin,” she said. “I’m not done thanking you. I may never be done thanking you. But I need to alter our little deal.”
“You don’t have to pay me to go after whoever did this.”
“I insist.”
*****
Before I went after Corbin, I needed to get Gypsy someplace she’d be hard to find. So while I planned to go after one geek, I called another. Tom Landrum, childhood pal, former roommate, and himself a beneficiary of the recent tech boom, owned a house in Put in Bay. Since Put in Bay sat on an island out in Lake Erie, it would not only be difficult to get to in November, it would probably not be on Corbin’s radar. Who the hell went to a resort town in the middle of Lake Erie in November?
Jane insisted on staying w
ith her, but I explained that the fewer people who knew where Gypsy was, the better. It took Gypsy some time to convince Jane I was right. The next morning, Gypsy and I drove out to Port Clinton, seventy miles west of Cleveland, where we caught the hovercraft out to Put in Bay. The hovercraft only ran twice a day from October through April to a marina that was otherwise closed. Tom agreed to let Gypsy rent the place for a month, though I hoped she wouldn’t need that much time.
We arrived the next morning in Put in Bay to find Police Chief Ken English waiting for us. I’d called ahead and given him the sanitized version of Gypsy’s dilemma. We did not expect him to meet us at the dock.
“Oh, no problem,” he said. “There’s less than a hundred fifty people on the island, and I’m the only full-time officer here in the off-season. Gets pretty boring here after the season ends.”
He drove us to Tom’s cottage on the west side of the island. Put in Bay looked like it fell out of a Stephen King novel. Away from the harbor, the place looked like one of those isolated island villages in Maine where King usually drops a monster or two, some of them quite human. The cottage sat at the edge of the island which would have made for some spectacular sunsets in the summer. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, it treated us to slate gray skies, angry green waves, and the cooling towers of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant.
“Nick?” she asked when I unlocked the place.
“Yes?”
“Did you notice anything… unusual about me?”
I grinned. “Yeah, you’re the only ex-call girl on the island that I know of.”
“I’m also the only black woman. Won’t I stick out?”
I kissed her on the nose. “Babe, we’re on an island in the middle of Lake Erie in late fall. We stuck out just by showing up.” I took her in my arms. “But we’re not exactly on the Shoreway. If you want, I’ll stay the night and go talk to Corbin tomorrow.”