A man’s voice: “Miss Mary Lou Bateson?”
“Yes,” I said. “Who is this?”
“My name is John Smack. I’m with Finkus, Holding, Incorporated. We’re the—”
“I know who you are,” I interrupted. “You handle the insurance for Grandby and Sons. I spoke to a man from your company yesterday, Mr. Smack. I told him all I know about the theft of the Demaretion.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “That was Ed Morphy, the salesman who services Grandby’s account. I’m an investigator, and I’d like to ask you a few more questions, if I may. At your convenience, of course.”
I sighed. No end to it. “I’m just as anxious to get this cleared up as you are,” I told him. “When and where do you want to meet?”
“I’m calling from Grandby’s. I was hoping to catch you in your office, but I understand you’re on leave of absence.”
“Not through choice,” I said, and he laughed.
“Only temporary, I’m sure. Any chance of my coming up to your place right now? I have the address. I could be there in twenty minutes.”
“All right,” I said, “come ahead. I hope you have some identification.”
“A business card,” he said. “But if you have any doubts, please call Stanton Grandby or Felicia Dodat; they’ll vouch for me.”
But instead, after we hung up, I phoned Hobart Juliana, having no great desire to chat with god or Madam Dodat. I asked Hobie to check and find out if John Smack really was an investigator for Finkus, Holding, Inc. Hobie called back in five minutes and said Smack was legitimate.
“They call him Jack Smack,” he said. “How do you like that?”
“Unreal,” I said.
“I miss you already, Dunk,” Hobie said sorrowfully. “The place isn’t the same without you.”
“And I miss you, too, dear,” I said. “Maybe if all these hotshot detectives get results, I’ll be back before you know it. I like that job, Hobie, and I want to keep it.”
“I know.”
“And besides, I need that paycheck—even with all the deductions.”
“Listen, Dunk,” he said anxiously, “if you get the shorts, don’t be bashful about asking me for help. I have a few dekadrachms I can lend you.”
“Wise guy,” I said, laughing, and hung up.
Jack Smack turned out to be a very elegant young man indeed. About thirty-five, I judged, and a few inches taller than me. His suit of raw black silk showed Italian tailoring, and he was wearing Aramis, which always turns me on.
I offered him refreshments, and he opted for a vodka on the rocks with a splash of water. I didn’t have a drink, figuring I better keep a clear head.
“No doubt about the coin being the genuine Demaretion when the case was sealed?” he asked me.
“No doubt whatsoever.”
“You saw the case sealed, and then you saw it put into the box, and
that
was taped?”
“Correct.”
“And the next time you saw container thirteen was when the armored truck delivered it to Grandby’s?”
“Correct again.”
He uncrossed his knees, crossed them in the other direction. He fussed with the hanging trouser leg to make certain the crease was unwrinkled. Then he sipped his vodka reflectively, tinking the rim of the glass gently against his white teeth.
Really a beau ideal: slender, graceful, with all the right moves. A wry smile—but that may have been part of his act. There
was
a certain theatricality about him; I had the sense of his being always
on.
But that didn’t diminish his attractiveness. He was possibly, I thought, the handsomest man I had ever seen—except for my oldest brother, Tom, who could have been minted on the obverse of a Greek drachm with a laurel wreath around his head.
“I understand Al Georgio is handling the case for the cops,” he said suddenly.
I nodded. “You know Detective Georgio?”
“We’ve worked on a few things together,” he acknowledged.
“Do I detect a slight note of hostility in your voice?” I asked him.
“Slight,” he admitted, coming down hard on the irony. “But it’s got nothing to do with Al personally. I really like the guy. It’s just that he’s police, and I’m insurance, and sometimes the two don’t see eye-to-eye.”
“I can’t understand that,” I said. “Both of you want the same thing, don’t you? To catch the crook.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “but not always.” He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, holding his drink with both hands. Very serious, very intent. “Look,” he said, “here’s how it works: Say a goniff steals something. Call it a painting we’ve insured for a hundred grand. The cops go to work trying to find out who did it. Now the guy who stole the painting will be lucky to get ten percent from a fence. That’s ten thousand dollars. So he contacts us and makes a deal. We pay him say, twenty thousand, and he returns the painting to us. He gets double what a fence would pay him, and we’re out twenty grand—which is a hell of a lot better than paying out a hundred grand in insurance.”
I stared at him. “How long has this been going on?” I demanded.
He laughed. “Since property insurance was invented. Actually, the thief isn’t stealing something of value; he’s kidnapping it and holding it for ransom. The cops hate it, because when we pay ransom, the crook strolls away whistling a merry tune.”
“I can see why the police would dislike deals like that,” I said. “But doesn’t it cost insurance companies a bundle?”
“So we raise premiums,” he said, shrugging.
“You think that’s what might happen with the Demaretion?”
“It could.”
“Has anyone called you, offering to sell back the coin?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Hey, I came here to ask you questions, and it seems to me you’re doing all the asking.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask away.”
He grinned ruefully. “Can’t think of anything else. We seem to have covered all the bases. At Grandby’s, they told me you’re called Dunk.”
“That’s right.”
“May I call you Dunk?”
“Sure.”
“Only if you call me Jack. I admit Jack Smack sounds like caramel popcorn, but I’ve learned to live with it. I hope we can work together on this thing, Dunk. I know you’ve been put on unpaid leave of absence—which was entirely unfair and unwarranted in my opinion—and you’ll want to clear your name. So maybe if the two of us can put our great brains together on this, you’ll be back to work before you know it.”
He smiled winsomely. A hard guy to resist. Al Georgio was charming, too, but Jack Smack was charming
consciously.
Every woman over the age of four is able to spot the difference. Which doesn’t mean we’re able to resist the deliberate charmer.
He got up to go, then paused for a moment. Dramatic effect.
“By the way,” he said casually, “no one lifted a single coin from a sealed display case within a taped container. I think the container itself was switched.”
After he was gone, I reflected that I had met two tall, handsome men in the last few hours—so the day wasn’t a total loss. But I recognized angrily my own stupidity at not seeing that stealing container thirteen and substituting a similar box (sans Demaretion) in its stead was the only way the robbery could have gone down.
Two male investigators, Georgio and Smack, had seen it at once. And I, witness and participant, had been racking my poor, feeble brain trying to imagine how it had been done. It was humiliating.
I have always been a competitive type; I suppose those driveway basketball games with my brothers contributed to that. Anyway, I was determined to show Georgio and Smack that I wasn’t just another pretty face; I had brains. Feminism had nothing to do with it; it was
personal.
I reasoned this way:
I accepted their theory that container thirteen had been switched. It was the only way the Demaretion could have been stolen. But when I exhibited the empty display case to Hobie in Grandby’s vault, it was absolutely identical to all the other teakwood cases with glass lids that housed the Havistock Collection. I was willing to swear to that.
Which meant there had to be at least fourteen display cases—right? And an empty extra, sealed, was substituted for the one containing the Demaretion.
Now then…what was the name of the guy Archibald Havistock said had made the cases? “The best man for that kind of work in the city,” he had told me. First name Nate—that I remembered. But the last name? Calesque? Colliski? Callico?—something like that. And he worked in Greenwich Village. I grabbed up the Manhattan telephone directory and Yellow Pages, and started searching.
It took me about fifteen minutes, but I found him: Nathaniel Colescui, custom carpentry, with a shop on Carmine Street. I pulled on beret, suede jacket, shoulder bag, and rushed out. Practically sprinted over to 86th Street and Broadway. Took the downtown IRT. All the short people in the subway car stared at me, but I was used to that.
I got off at Houston Street and walked back to Carmine. Colescui’s shop wasn’t hard to find. It was right next to a pub-type restaurant that had a legend gold-leafed on its window:
FOUNDED IN
1984. That tickled me—but I guess when a restaurant lasts two years in Manhattan, it’s something to brag about.
Colescui’s window didn’t brag, it just said:
CUSTOM CARPENTRY, EVERYTHING TO ORDER
. Inside, it smelled pleasantly of freshly sawed wood, and there was a fine mist of sawdust in the air. The middle-aged black woman pounding away at an ancient typewriter at the front desk was wearing a hat, and I could understand why.
She stopped her typing when I came in. “Hep you?” she asked.
“I’d like to inquire about having a display case made,” I said. “For coins.”
She swung around on her swivel chair and yelled into the back room. “Nate!” she screamed. “Customer!”
I heard the diminishing whine of a power saw switched off. Then a twinkly gnome of a man came out of the back, pushing goggles up onto his bald skull. He was wearing a leather apron over what looked like a conservative, three-piece business suit, plus white shirt and jacquard tie. And all of him—scalp, eyebrows, suit, apron, shoes, everything—was coated with sawdust, as if someone had gone over him with a shaker, sprinkling vigorously.
He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. He looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Now if you and I had a son, he would be just right.”
“Great idea,” I told the old man. “When do you want to start?”
“Oh-ho,” he said. “A fresh lady. I like fresh ladies. Clara, did you hear that? When do you want to start, she asks me.”
“I heard,” the typist said, then addressed me. “Don’t listen to him; he’s all talk and no do.”
That made the little guy laugh. His method of laughing was to clamp his dentures, press his lips tightly together, close his eyes and shake. His whole body bounced up and down.
When the seismic disturbance was over, I said, “Mr. Colescui?”
“The same,” he said, “but a fresh lady like you can call me Nate.”
“Nate,” I said, “I came to ask about having a display case made for my coin collection. Do you do things like that?”
“Everything I do,” he said. “Display cases, tables, chairs, bookcases, picture frames—whatever. What size display case you thinking of?”
“I was at a friend’s house the other night,” I said, faintly ashamed of myself for scamming such a nice man in this fashion, “and he kept his coin collection in beautiful cases he said you had made for him. I was wondering if I could get one case like those he had.”
“Oh-ho,” Nate Colescui said, head tilted to one side. “And what was this customer’s name?”
“Havistock. Archibald Havistock.”
He went to a battered file, pulled open the top drawer, began rummaging through folders. “Habley, Hammond, Harrison…Yes, here it is: Havistock.” He withdrew the file, opened it, began reading, holding it close to his nose. “Oh my yes, I remember this now. Several years ago. A
big
order. The finest teak, tempered glass lids, velvet lining, recessed brass hardware. Everything the best.” He peered up at me in a kindly way. “And expensive.”
“How expensive?” I asked him.
“Mr. Havistock paid four hundred dollars a case. But as I say, that was several years ago. I’m afraid it would be considerably more today. Say six hundred a case.” He must have seen my shock, for he added, “Of course I could make the same size case in pine, maybe maple or cherrywood. Put the hardware on the outside. Skimp a little here and there. Make it affordable.”
“But it wouldn’t look like Mr. Havistock’s cases.”
“No,” he said, with an understanding smile, “it wouldn’t.”
“Well, that’s that,” I said, sighing. “I had no idea they cost that much.”
He shrugged. “A lot of work. Dovetail joints. Everything just so.”
“How many cases did Mr. Havistock have made?” I asked casually.
He consulted the file again. “Fifteen.”
“Wow,” I said. “My poor little coin collection isn’t worth that much. Well, thank you for your time and cooperation, Nate. If I ever decide to have a case made, I’ll bother you again.”
“No bother,” he protested. “It’s always a pleasure to talk to a fresh lady like you. Stop in anytime.”
I left the shop and tramped north to Sheridan Square. The day had started out balmy, but now there was an edge to the wind, and the blue had disappeared behind a screen of muddy clouds. Pedestrians were beginning to hustle, and I noticed several were carrying furled umbrellas. That always amazed me about New York: It can be a perfectly clear day, then clouds come over, it begins to drizzle, and suddenly everyone has an umbrella—except me.
But the possibility of getting caught in a shower, and having my suede jacket spotted, didn’t concern me half so much as those fifteen display cases Archibald Havistock had purchased. Thirteen of them housed his original collection. That left two empty extras, presumably stored in the Havistock apartment.
If one of the extras was missing, it would be proof positive that it had been substituted for the case containing the Demaretion. I was gloating over my newly discovered talents as a detective when I stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, stunned by the realization that the thief might have removed the Demaretion and left its case with the other extra. Result: two empty cases, just as there should be.