The Case of the Yellow Diamond (6 page)

 

Chapter 10

I
sprawled on my lady's carpet, staring up at her petite slacks-clad knees on the couch next to my head. “So that's the basic story. If it was just the Bartelmes' difficulties I might dismiss the whole thing as ordinary break-ins and that kind of trouble.”

“Don't you think it's odd that lawyer tried to get you to quit the case?”

I smiled to myself, thinking,
Exactly, babe. The more somebody tries to make me go away, the more likely I am to stick around.

“It's not likely that lawyer acted on his own, is it?” she went on. Her fingers trailed over the edge of the couch cushion and I nibbled at them.

“Don't think so, but the answer to that could depend on what kind of lawyer he is. I mean, is he just a functionary, doing whatever he's told or does he actively look out for his clients' interests? I don't know the man. Yet.”

“I could perhaps help in that line of questions,” Catherine said, leaning forward and peering over the edge of the couch at me.

“You could?”

“Sure. I have a lawyer, you know. A whole firm, in fact. Lawyers know about other lawyers. I'll ask. Discreetly, it goes without saying.”

“Ah, my resources are becoming infinite,” I said, raising a hand and caressing her nearest knee. “My reach is global. I am not to be denied.”

“Well, don't go getting a big head over it,” she giggled, pushing my hand away and getting up from the couch. “I'm making tea. Want some?”

* * * *

The next morning things had changed dramatically, and not for the better. When I got to my office I had two calls on the answering device. I'd ignored them at the apartment because I didn't like to bring my work home except, of course, when necessary. The earliest call came in late the previous afternoon from the lawyer, Gareth Anderson.”I haven't had an answer, Mr. . . . Sean. My, ah, my client is anxious to know where we stand. I need to hear from you right away that you've declined to take Bartelmes' case. Please get back to me.”
Pushy,
I thought. I wondered if Gareth was feeling a little pressure. If so, where from?

I needed to put him off for as long as possible. The longer he and his principal, whoever it was, weren't certain of my role in this affair of the Yap, the longer I had an advantage, however slight. In my business, slight advantages were sometimes all it took. A razor-thin hesitation, like that over my double name, I could sometimes parlay into a solution. Or if not that, a little protection that could occasionally keep me alive.

The other call was from St. Louis. PI Max Wisnewsky. His report suggested there indeed had been some thievery at the deceased's apartment, or condo, or house. I'd have to check on exactly what Mr. Lewis's accommodation had been. I was of the opinion that the kind of living circumstances a person had were often a clue into where and how I might uncover important information. Even in remote St. Louis. I called him back.

“What's the situation? What kind of a place did our Mr. Lewis have?”

Wisnewski hummed while he thought how to answer my question. “Small, one bedroom, no separate dining room. An apartment on the third floor. Elevator, nice middle-class building.”

“Tell me about the apartment itself,” I said, scribbling on a pad.

“Hard to tell now. The place was thoroughly trashed, as I mentioned.”

“Yeah,” I said, wishing I could see the place for myself. Maybe I'd see if the Bartelmes would pop for a quick trip to Saint Louie.

“The guy was a vet, heavily invested in world war memorabilia, and not just his own career. Pictures on the walls, lot of groups.”

“Framed pictures on the walls. Lots of them.” I squinted at the far wall of my office, visualizing Mr. Lewis's apartment. “Tell me more detail.”

Wisnewsky sighed. “Mostly, as I said, there are group photos. You know, guys standing together under the wing of an airplane or sitting on a bunch of bombs. In fatigues, mostly. One or two with the billed dress cap, likely the pilots. Maybe a bombardier. Some of them have a legend printed on the photograph. You know the kind? Those are probably the official record pictures. They took a lot of those all over the world, you know?”

“Yes, I do know. They were all framed pictures on the walls, right?”

“Right. Under glass.”

“All right.” I made a note and stared at my bare wall. I ought to get some art up there. Something evocative to put clients in the right frame of mind. Catherine would help me choose. “What else?”

“Neighbors said he always carried a big key ring. Nobody has seen it. And apparently the cops in . . . where is that? Wy-no-nah? What's that, some kind of Scandinavian name?”

“Indian. Winona. Native American word,” I said. “No key ring in his effects up here.” I was thinking hard. “Listen, he had a box, a safe deposit box, right? It's been opened, and there's nothing much of significance, just personal papers, mementos, right?”

“Pretty much. Except for one thing.”

“One thing?”

“Yeah. They found a pebble in a tiny brown paper envelope. Actually, a rough diamond.”

“Really. A diamond. What's the deal?”

“It's not huge, maybe half a carat, maybe more. Local police are running it down. Not even a faint pencil mark on the envelope.”

“Okay. Stay with it. I'm not sure how my client feels, but I'd like to know whatever they can discover about that rock. And do something else for me. I'd like a decent copy of each of the pictures hanging on Stan Lewis's wall.”

“Big job. That'll take a while, but I can do it.”

“Thanks. I'll be in touch.”

It probably didn't mean anything. On the other hand, Stan Lewis was an old vet, a man who had only a high school education who joined the Army right after graduation. Here was a guy who never distinguished himself at anything. His meteoric rise in the military got him two more pay grades in almost seven years and a posting to a ground crew for an undistinguished bomber group that did nearly all its time on New London in the Pacific. After being mustered out in 1948, I knew he went home and got a succession of jobs as a maintenance guy that kept him in a reasonable way. Then he retired, never married, no kids anyone knew of. A nice ordinary veteran who did his duty and lived out a quiet life. The American Dream.

So why was he murdered on a train in Winona, Minnesota, and why did he have an uncut diamond in his safe deposit box?

I decided to call Tod Bartelme.

“Tod.”

“Yeah, Sean.” He sounded tired, or weary.

“How's Calvin doing?”

“Good. Getting better fast. Listen, Sean, I'm tied up here. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to ask about Stan Lewis.”

“Can it wait? Maybe later today or tomorrow sometime?”

“Normally, I'd say yes, but something's come up that may interfere with my investigation. We should talk, and I want to show you some things.”

A pause while my client thought about his life at that moment. “All right. Meet me at the storage place in Maplewood at one. Will that do? I have to go there again to let the police in.”

“One this afternoon. Sure. Thanks.”

Not ideal, but that would work.

I sauntered down the hall to my good Swedish buddies, the Revulons. “If you have a few, I could use a search or two.”

Belinda looked up from her keyboard and took a deep breath. I sometimes thought she did that consciously just to provoke me. I admired her cleavage in the neckline under her thin blouse and grinned.

“Diamonds,” I said. “I need to know about diamonds. Where they come from, a little history, but mainly some sources so I can read up on the little rocks. Can do?”

“Can do. I'll bring you a printout.”

I returned to my office and thought about Richard Hillier.

An hour later I was still thinking about Mr. Hillier. I knew he worked for Mr. Pederson. My information from several impeachable sources was that he did some heavy lifting for Pederson. Why was he present when I talked to the family? Had he figured there might be need for his muscle? Or did Pederson just have the man around all the time? Nobody had commented on his being at a family gathering. Maybe some people thought he was sort of part of the family.

There came a rap-rap-rapping at my office door. Not a raven. Rather the blonde Belinda entered with a fist full of printouts of stuff she'd found on the Internet. She smiled and laid them on my desk.

“Interesting stones, diamonds,” she said. “I got some surprises.”

“Were you discreet?”

“Always, Sean. No cookies, snacks, or tracks.”

“Excellent,” I said and picked up the neat pile of papers. One of the reasons I liked having Belinda or Beulah Revulon do my searching was the security factor. They had enthusiastic tricks to obscure their presence in any site, anywhere. They seemed to love detecting and then thwarting the little programs on websites designed to register your address and then send you stuff you didn't want, called cookies. Their cloaking expertise meant I was not advertising my interest in ways that might come back to bite me or my clients. It also meant it was unnecessary for me to invest in expensive and complex electronics to protect me and my clients.

The information Ms. Revulon had dredged up was indeed interesting. It seems diamonds were an ancient trade, beginning in India in a previous century. Before the Christian era, in fact. Way before. Africa got all the publicity at the moment, but it is wasn't the first nor even the primary source of diamonds in our world.

Diamonds were found in varying quantities throughout the Far East and some of the most famous and largest were from that part of the world. Today, it turned out, Australia was responsible for most of the world's diamond mining. Who knew? I reached for the telephone and dialed St. Louis again.

“Max. Me again. About that diamond. I think I want as much about its source as your intrepid dicks can discover. I don't just mean who may have sold it to Lewis, but where it was mined and how it might have come into Stan's hand. Even theories, solid or half-baked.”

“I take it you're developing some theories of your own.”

“Perhaps, but I don't want to jinx it.”

“I get it. Later.”

I hung up again thinking about an American GI who spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia during the turmoil of war. Coming home with a contraband diamond or three wouldn't be so strange. There were definitely layers to this Yap business that would have to be excavated in greater depth, as it were.

 

Chapter 11

E
xploration, if not with spade and pick, was something I had experience with. Meanwhile, there was other business to attend to, such as the mail, depositing incoming checks for past work, and bill paying. So I sat at my desk and did paperwork while the sun tracked slowly across the worn wooden planks of my office floor. There were no phone calls, no assassination attempts. The world spun neither faster nor came to a halt. An ordinary morning ended when I left the office to grab a fast lunch on my way to meet Bartelme.

In Maplewood, back at the gate to the storage facility, I was accosted with a hostile or suspicious look from the old guy at the gate. Maybe he had a thing for short guys. Tod was already at his storage bin with the overhead door rolled up. He was almost out of sight at the back of the space when I arrived, muttering to himself, shoving boxes around.

“Yo, Mr. Bartelme,” I called.

Silence. He was apparently frozen in place.

“Tod,” I tried again, “Sean Sean here.” I stepped carefully across the sun-slammed open front of the place.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. You startled me, I guess. Hang on.”

More boxes being moved. My client appeared at one side of the space. I put out a hand and he wiped his right on his dusty jeans and we shook.

“You seem a little jumpy.”

Bartelme shrugged and mopped his face with a white hanky he extricated from the back pocket of his tight pants. “Yeah, I guess. Cal's shooting after what happened here has really freaked me out. His mother will be arriving in a few hours.”

“That's what I want to talk to you about. I did a little research. Had some help from some of the neighbor boys. We recreated as best we could the circumstances of the shooting.” I laid out the prints I'd made on the hood of Tod's car. He was quick to see what I had seen.

“The shot must have come from across the bay.” He put his finger on the picture of the brush I had examined.

“Right. The shot didn't come from inside the house.” I looked him in the eye.

He looked back. “You thought it had?”

I nodded. “That thought did occur. Just as it did to you.”

Tod frowned and shook his head vigorously. “No, no. Never. No one could have. Not from the house. Ridiculous.”

“Sure, but you did consider it. Your relief here was apparent to me. Which tells me something. I thought about it because that's my job. That's what you hired me for. To think about all the possibilities. So c'mon, Tod, what aren't you telling me? I've felt all along there are undercurrents, stuff that isn't being talked about. All families have—what's the current phrase?—issues. Right. We don't have disagreements or conflicts or fights anymore. We have issues. At first I thought it might be Maxine. That act can be embarrassing, I agree.”

“Act?” Tod interrupted.

“Sure. She turns it off and on like a light switch. Maxine's pulling your collective chains. I just don't know why. I have other questions in that arena, but first, that little grove over there.” I pointed at one picture. “I went there. I looked carefully and discovered something that satisfies me that was where the shooter stood.” I paused but Tod didn't ask what it was I had found. Was that significant? Or was he just burdened with a lot of other questions?

“Another thing I wanted to tell you is this,” I continued. “I've had a conversation with the lawyer, Gareth Anderson. He encouraged me to refuse this case. Any idea why that is?”

Tod frowned and shook his head. “No idea. He contributed to the first trips and we've asked for more, but I don't know why he'd want you off the case.”

“He's not your lawyer, correct?”

“Right. He's had Preston, Josie's dad, as a business client for years. Josie and I don't have a regular attorney. Maybe he's worried about the costs of these trips to his client.”

“It's probably nothing.”I shrugged. “Maybe he just doesn't like short guys. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention I told you about his approach.”

No reaction. I had to be careful how much I tried to influence Tod's actions going forward. I didn't want to be responsible for more mayhem. “I figure all the people I met on your deck have had some level of financial input to your wife's project. True?”

“That's right. When these incidents began to happen—the vandalism, the thefts—and we talked about hiring a detective, some of the family objected. In spite of how it maybe looks, we really aren't wealthy and it's stretching us to make these trips.”

“I'm going to have separate conversations with everybody involved. I'd prefer it if you didn't alert anybody before I get to them.”

Bartelme nodded. “No problem. I don't like some of them all that much, anyway.”

“Where's your wife?”

He looked at me for a long moment and then said. “She's either at home or at the hospital with Cal. Cal's mother's arriving from Chicago any time. I guess I already said that, and I think Josie feels responsible. Like she didn't keep Cal safe the way his own mother would have.”

“Here's something else that's interesting. Stan Lewis, the veteran you were supposed to meet?”

Tod winced and nodded. Taking responsibility for violent acts of others seemed to run in the Bartelme family. “They opened his safe deposit box and found a single uncut diamond of fairly significant size.”

I stopped. I was watching Tod closely. He didn't give me anything other than mild surprise.

“Is that significant?” he asked.

“I don't know. You have any diamond jewelry?”

“Josie has a few pieces. Inherited from her mother, I think. You'll have to ask her.”

“Not necessary. I take it Lewis's diamond doesn't mean anything to you.”

“Nope.”

I left, assuring Tod I'd check back in a day or so. When I got to the Bartelmes' house in White Bear Lake, luck smiled my way. Josie had just arrived from the hospital where she and Calvin's mother had had a tearful meeting, and the rest of the family was off the premises. We sat down in the cool living room next to the fieldstone fireplace.

“How did you come to this idea?” I asked Josie. “To try to locate your relative's remains?”

“Seems a little ghoulish, you think?”

“That wasn't my initial reaction, but I understand how some people might feel that way.”

“The government has this bureau that's responsible for tracking down MIAs. Mostly they're looking for service people from Vietnam and Korea. There's a lab in Hawaii that does advanced DNA testing of remains when they're found. Various groups around the country are trying to put together detailed histories of military units. I think reunions of military units happen almost every month somewhere.”

I remembered reading about the marking of the December seventh anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor where American vets and Japanese vets came together in a peaceful commemoration.

“So when I began to hear a little about my relatives who had fought in World War Two, I wondered about my granduncle, Richard.

“It wasn't very strong at first, but Tod got interested too. Uncle Amundson is the only man in my family not buried in a cemetery somewhere. We have two relatives at Arlington and one in France, like a lot of families with military traditions.

“Once we'd found his record, Tod discovered there's a small group of army air force guys still alive from the same bomber group, the 350th.”

“I gather you've talked with some. Did they know your granduncle?”

“Only one of them who knew him is still alive. The group was big enough that not everybody knew every other plane crew. I guess planes were shifted in and out of bomber groups, sometimes for only a few missions.”

“Could be confusing, I bet. Hard to trace and hard for the guys to remember.”

She smiled, tilting her head while she took a minute. “Yes. There's still a lot of conflicting information out there. A lot of the men with time on their hands wrote diaries, sometimes while they were flying the actual missions. There are contemporaneous observations and records of air combat, in my granduncle's case.”

“And I guess some of them don't agree, am I right?”

“Do I sound like a lawyer?” Josie smiled. “Correct. Even more interesting, the official record, usually from the national archives, is sometimes quite different from the recollections of the guys who were there.”

“But you and your husband sorted that all out.”

“Yes, although we're still sorting. In the process we made contact with a lot of veterans groups and relatives of some of the people linked to the bomber group. The 350th. That's how we found Stan Lewis.” Her voice broke, and she grabbed a tissue to blow her nose.

“Once your search led you to the ocean off Yap Island, what happened next?

“We talked about how to get to the islands and trying to find the plane. To dive on the site. Tod wanted to raid our retirement money and our IRAs. But I talked to my dad. He agreed to help.”

“How did Tod react when you told him?”

“At first he was unhappy I'd talked to dad about it at all, but then I suggested we try to make it a family project. Richard Amundson's a relative to all of us, after all. So we wrote to everybody in my family. All the related Pedersons.”

“And?”

“And they were very generous.”

“Anybody in particular?”

“You mean besides my dad?” She smiled and glanced over my shoulder toward where I knew there was a handsome clock on a sideboard.

“What about your husband's family?”

“Yes. We wrote to them as well. Some of them agreed to help. A couple, who could afford it, gave quite a lot. They're all from the East Coast so we don't see them very often. That's another reason why this is so upsetting. We've had help from lots of family members. And now that we've made contact with family and some of the living fliers, they're really interested, too.”

“I can understand that. Any of the planes shot down that you find have links to families of the crews? It must be very personal for a lot of people,” I said. It was beginning to look as if I might have a Cecil B. DeMille production here, a cast of thousands.

“Mr. Sean,” Josie said, “Cal's being released from the hospital and his mother's bringing him here to the house for a few more days. They should be here at any time, and I still have to get a bedroom ready.”

“I understand. Just one more question for now. Do you have any diamond jewelry?”

She stared at me for a moment. “What an odd question.”

I explained about Stan Lewis's gem. “I don't know if it means anything one way or another. But questions are my stock in trade.”

“I have some pieces I can show you at another time. I inherited them from my mother.”

“Thanks. I'll call again when I have more questions.” That was a foregone conclusion. We walked to the door.