Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

  “Can you see anything?” Prudence asked, angling herself to peer past Mr. Washington’s large white rump without betraying her presence.

  “Mr. Hayes is talking to a little fellow who’s sitting on a bench taking off his skates,” Danny said from his perch atop the rear of the cab. “Standing up now. No bigger than an eight-year-old, but thickset. He’s like P.T. Barnum’s General Tom Thumb.”

  “A dwarf?” General Tom Thumb had been one of Barnum’s most famous attractions. Even though he’d been dead for more than six years, Prudence still remembered being taken to see him perform.

  Geoffrey chuckled ruefully. “I should have known. None of my men have heard anything about this fence for the last couple of years. We all thought he’d died or left the city. Nobody knows his real name or where he lives, but everybody with a stolen stone to sell would like to be able to deal with him. He pays good money and there’s never a trail for the police to follow. The man’s as much a legend as Barnum’s Tom Thumb, Prudence, but for different reasons.”

  “Mr. Hayes is on his way back,” Danny Dennis said. “But I don’t know where the little fellow has gotten to. I swear I haven’t taken my eyes off him. He just disappeared into thin air.”

  “That’s another one of the legends he’s created about himself,” Geoffrey said. “He’s as corporeal as the rest of us, but he’d like you to believe he’s as elusive as an elf. It’s good cover.”

  “He says he hasn’t laid eyes on a single one of the stones I described,” Ned Hayes reported as Tyrus bundled him in a blanket, wedged him between Prudence and Geoffrey for extra warmth, then climbed up to sit beside Danny Dennis again.

  “I wouldn’t have expected that,” Geoffrey commented.

  “He told me he knew there were some old, high quality stones being fenced, but he heard they were all recut before they appeared on the market. What he figures is they were too easily recognizable to do anything else with them. No professional would waste stones like that; he’d find some way to get rid of them without ruining them, even if he had to take them to Europe. It’s the mark of an amateur to settle for wholesale cutting.”

  “Another useless lead,” Prudence mourned. “I’m beginning to think we’ll never get to the bottom of this, Geoffrey.”

  “There’s one more thing we could try,” Ned commented, breaking open the rapidly cooling baked potato he’d been given to warm his hands. Now that he was out and about with a case to solve, he’d shaken off his hangover and recovered his appetite.

  “What’s that?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Is your aunt at home, Prudence?” Ned mumbled through a mouthful of floury potato.

  “It’s almost four o’clock. She’ll be having her afternoon tea,” Prudence said. The elaborate ritual had become as much a part of her household’s routine as Josiah’s brewing of imported leaves whenever Lady Rotherton graced the office with her presence.

  “Let me work this out a moment.” Ned scooped more potato flesh into his mouth. “Needs salt,” he said.

  * * *

  “What we do is spread the word that there’s an Englishwoman of means and social standing who’s looking to purchase quality gems to take back to England with her. And that she’ll buy what’s on offer without provenance because she’s planning to smuggle them past Customs to avoid paying duty. That should bring every twitchy rabbit out of his hole.”

  “How do we do it without revealing my identity?” Lady Rotherton asked, eyes sparkling at the idea of pulling off what amounted to a nearly Pinkerton-like ruse. “And where do I meet your criminal rabbits?”

  “We take a leaf from the book of New York’s most successful fence,” Geoffrey said. “You meet each one out in the open, at different locations. And we set up the meets through the want ads.”

  “It’s done all the time,” Ned explained, wolfing down cucumber-and-ham sandwiches with cup after cup of sugary tea. “Everybody reads the want ads; they’re the best part of the newspaper.”

  “Aristocratic British noblewoman wants to buy stolen diamonds?” Lady Rotherton scoffed. “I think we need something a bit more discreet.”

  “There are certain code words and phrases our thief or his fence will recognize,” Ned continued. “We’ll write up the ad and Josiah can put it in all of tomorrow’s papers. Morning, afternoon, and evening editions.”

  “Won’t that attract too many of your dubious characters?” Lady Rotherton asked. She disliked not being in complete control of the plot Ned had sketched out.

  “You won’t be alone and there will never be more than one respondent at a time,” Geoffrey promised. “Whoever answers the ad writes to a box number. We tackle them individually, and most of them we won’t reply to at all.”

  “Trust me, my lady,” Ned promised. “I can spot a likely suspect from a mile away.”

  “And you’ve done this type of thing successfully before?” she asked.

  “More times than you can imagine,” Ned lied. More often than not, the ploy had been a bust. But Lady Rotherton didn’t need to know that.

  “Where do we start?” Lady Rotherton asked, tugging on the bellpull for more tea and another plate of sandwiches.

  “With the ad itself,” Geoffrey replied.

  He set his Pinkerton-style notebook and gold-nibbed fountain pen on the table, daring a conspiratorial wink at Prudence. She’d coached them in exactly how to seduce her aunt into agreeing to work the con. Adept as Prudence was at disguises, she knew she’d never manage as good an eccentric, titled English lady persona as her aunt Gillian.

  Who was, after all, the real thing.

  * * *

  They settled on two responses to the ad that had only had to run for a single day to bring them what Ned called the real deal.

  “They may not have the stones we’re after,” he said, eyes scanning a map of Manhattan, “but they’ll know if they ever made it on to the market and probably how they were recut. And who did the job.”

  “What about the rest of these?” Josiah asked. He’d created a file for the letters that had quickly filled up the post office box they’d rented as being a safer and more efficient option than allowing answers to pile up at the various newspapers. The Hunter and MacKenzie secretary was loathe to let go of any scrap of paper pertaining to a case. You never knew when you might end up needing what at first glance had seemed irrelevant.

  “Keep them if there’s room in the cabinet,” Geoffrey ordered, knowing that Josiah was likely to ignore any suggestion that he burn them in the fireplace or tear them into bits too tiny for anyone to piece together.

  “We can take care of both of these tomorrow,” Ned decided, pointing out the two locations he’d chosen, one in a small park near the Astor Hotel, the other in the enormous and always crowded waiting room of Grand Central Depot. Neither of their correspondents had identified himself by name, but both Ned and Josiah had agreed that one of them appeared far more cautious than the other.

  “He’ll be reassured by having a crowd around him,” Ned had decided. “This other man sounds like the type not to want to be trapped in any kind of confined space. The park I’m directing him to doesn’t have a fence or a gate to make him feel hemmed in.”

  It was Lady Rotherton’s opinion that neither man would notice his surroundings once she mentioned the number of stones she wanted to purchase and the amount of cash money she was prepared to pay. She was also counting on the fact that even when she wasn’t proposing an attractive business deal, most men found her irresistible.

  The only thing they’d argued over was Prudence’s determination to be somewhere nearby while her aunt was meeting with the presumed diamond thieves.

  “If you’re spotted, there won’t be a second chance with either of these men,” Geoffrey maintained. He didn’t see how any red-blooded male could be unaware of Prudence’s presence, even at a distance.

  “Dress her as a nursemaid and give her a carriage to push through the park,” Lady Rotherton suggested. “And at Grand Centr
al Depot she can stand in one of the corners and sell flowers out of a bucket. No one will pay any attention to her.”

  It wasn’t ideal, and she wouldn’t be within hearing distance, but it was the best Prudence could get Geoffrey and Ned to agree to.

  In the end, Prudence’s elaborate disguises didn’t matter at all.

  The stones offered to the aristocratic English lady who planned to smuggle them through Customs weren’t worth the risk or the money. Even recut, Lady Rotherton knew right away that what she was shown had never been intended to adorn the neck of Marie Antoinette. And when she leaned close enough so the Paris perfume blended especially for her enveloped the men she proceeded to question, neither of them could swear to ever having laid eyes on any of the famous stones Tiffany had brought back from France.

  After Ned’s nameless General Tom Thumb lookalike, they were the most talented fences in the city. But even they turned out to be dead ends.

  It looked as though Lena’s stolen diamonds had evaporated into thin air.

  CHAPTER 26

  William De Vries’s condition took a sudden turn for the worse the day after Ned’s scheme to locate the Marie Antoinette diamonds failed.

  “She writes that the doctor has told her to prepare for the end,” Prudence told Geoffrey, handing him Lena’s note.

  “We have very little time left,” he read aloud. “That’s an odd way to phrase it. I wonder what she means by we.”

  “Lena’s not a fool.”

  “Far from it,” he agreed.

  “William might not be able to speak, but it’s possible he can answer yes or no questions by blinking his eyes,” Prudence mused.

  “What could he have to tell us that we don’t already know?” Geoffrey asked. “He fired us and tried to end the investigation when he decided Morgan was the guilty party, and he never changed his mind. He believed his stepson was a drunken thief right up until the moment he collapsed.”

  “There’s something else,” Prudence insisted. “There has to be.”

  * * *

  Straw had been laid in the street outside the De Vries home and in the alleyway behind it. All of the curtains and draperies were drawn tightly over the windows to muffle the sound of horse-drawn vehicles passing along this residential section of Fifth Avenue. Preparations for death, rituals to be observed as a life ended and a family girded itself for loss.

  The feeling of opulent gloom that Prudence always experienced whenever she stepped inside the mansion was stronger than ever, the heavy silence more oppressive. The butler and the footman who took their wraps directed her and Lady Rotherton toward the staircase leading to the upper stories. Lena’s lady’s maid waited to escort them to the room where the vigil was being kept. Geoffrey had elected to remain at the office.

  “I’ve done this more times than I care to think about,” Lady Rotherton commented as they walked across the black and white tile floor. “It’s never easy to watch someone die.”

  “You’ve known William for a very long time,” Prudence said. She’d sat at her father’s bedside during his final illness, straining her ears for the sound of a heartbeat, eyes glued to the diminishing rise and fall of his chest as his heart failed.

  “William was a different man in his younger years. We all change as we age. Some of us more than others,” Lady Rotherton said.

  She lapsed into silence then, not another word spoken until Taylor opened the door to her employer’s bedroom and Lena rose from her post at her husband’s bedside to greet them. One hand drifted without conscious thought to her waist.

  Lady Rotherton’s slight but audible intake of breath broke the silence of the death vigil.

  Everett Rinehart, standing at one of the windows facing onto Fifth Avenue, let fall the drape he had twitched aside and bowed in their direction. The nurse who had been attending William when the crisis began leaned over her patient to wipe a trail of spittle from his chin. The doctor who would pronounce him dead paused for a moment in the writing of his case notes.

  The room was airless, close, overly warm with heat radiating from the fireplace and the registers of the gas furnace pumping away in the basement. Bowls of water stood on dresser and tabletops and in the corners of the room, moistening the dryness of the air to a nearly tropical mugginess.

  The once bristling, vibrantly alive banker lay wasted, shriveled, and frighteningly still beneath neatly tucked white sheets and a down coverlet.

  As she folded Lena into her arms, Prudence detected an unexpected hard roundness not unlike the protuberant belly older women sometimes developed when they no longer denied themselves the indulgences of the table. But Lena had always been so slender. After the death of her son and now with the final illness of her husband, Prudence wouldn’t have been surprised to find her nearly as thin as the frail figure in the bed.

  “I didn’t know whom else to tell,” Lena said, moving from Prudence’s arms to embrace Lady Rotherton. “Neither William nor I have any remaining family.” She blinked rapidly, then flushed. “Except Everett, of course. And he’s already here.”

  “You must rest, my dear,” Lady Rotherton said, leading Lena back to the chair where she had been sitting for who knew how long. “Young man?”

  Everett moved quickly, opening the bedroom door to order the footman on duty outside to bring more chairs. Once Prudence and Lady Rotherton had settled in beside Lena, he went back to stand at the window, again tweaking aside the drape with one finger so he could look out at the world of the living.

  The doctor spoke quietly to the nurse, leaned briefly over Lena, then left the room.

  Prudence didn’t have to be told that he would not be summoned back until William’s last few moments, when the death rattle signaled that the end was imminent. She tried to banish from her mind the memory of her father’s final moments. She had hoped never to have to relive them.

  Lady Rotherton reached out with one hand, gripping Prudence’s fingers firmly yet reassuringly. Her other hand lay quietly across Lena’s upturned palm. “Courage, my dears,” she whispered. “Courage.”

  It was only a murmur in the silent room, but William’s eyelids fluttered and then opened. His unfocused gaze drifted past the three women to the figure at the window, then back again, as if he were trying to place all of them. Who were they? Why were they here? When his eyes came to rest on Lena, she inched her chair as close to the bed as she could, bending toward her husband’s face, speaking softly and soothingly to him.

  A spasm contorted the mouth William could not control, and again the nurse leaned in to wipe away spittle.

  “I don’t think he can understand what you’re saying, Mrs. De Vries,” she said, “but the sound of your voice may be comforting.”

  William looked anything but comforted. The muscles of his face contorted into a masklike rigidity, then collapsed as quickly as they had twisted out of normal shape. His eyes bulged from their sockets and a guttural, grating noise rose from the back of his throat, loud and hostile like the growl of an angry dog. Clearly he was trying and failing to speak, the last remnant of the man he had once been fighting with all his strength to pierce through the armored cage of paralysis.

  When he lost consciousness again and the anger he had tried to express sank into blankness, the nurse nodded to Everett. There wasn’t much time left.

  “Does he know?” Lady Rotherton asked Lena as the door closed behind William’s nephew.

  Lena turned away in mute despair.

  And then Prudence understood why Lena looked and felt so different, why her dying husband had erupted into frustrated fury at the sight of her.

  “Not now,” Lady Rotherton whispered.

  The door opened. Everett entered first, followed by the doctor. Both men stood at the foot of the bed, listening. When the last breath was exhaled and William had been pronounced well and truly gone, her now late husband’s nephew led Lena from the room, trailed by Lady Rotherton and Prudence.

  “Brandy, I think,” Everett suggeste
d, helping Lena down the staircase to the smaller of the two parlors. He poured a tot of Courvoisier for each of them. “To Uncle William,” he said, raising a toast to the dead man.

  “To William.” Lena touched her lips to the glass, but did not drink.

  Lady Rotherton’s eyes were bright with unshed tears.

  Prudence wished Geoffrey had come. She felt empty and alone, yet William De Vries had been nothing more to her than her father’s friend and a bothersome client.

  “I’ll leave you ladies now,” Everett said, putting down his empty glass. “I must speak to the doctor, and there are other details to be worked out.”

  “He took over management of the household as soon as William was brought home,” Lena said when Everett had disappeared and they could hear his footsteps ascending to the second floor. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  “Are you familiar with the provisions of your husband’s will?” Lady Rotherton asked.

  “Aunt Gillian!” Prudence exclaimed.

  “Lena is a widow in a delicate condition. Which makes her doubly vulnerable, Prudence. Something you should think about in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation. I repeat, Lena. Are you familiar with the provisions of your husband’s will?”

  “William said I would never have to be concerned about my welfare.” Her voice shook as she spoke, but there were still no tears.

  “When did he tell you that?” Lady Rotherton pressed.

  “Shortly after we were married.”

  “That was a long time ago. Both of you probably still hoped for children.”

  Lena said nothing.

  “I know what it’s like to disappoint a husband,” Lady Rotherton continued. “Viscount Rotherton married me for my fortune and my assumed fertility. I married him for his title and the adventure of living somewhere other than where I’d been born and raised. Except for the fertility, each of us got what we bargained for, albeit for a much shorter time than anticipated. Not quite a year of wedded bliss, to be exact. My father wrote the provisions of the marriage contract. He was a very canny gentleman when it came to finances. Let’s hope you are equally well protected.”