Джон Макдональд: Finding Anne Farley [= Ring My Love with Diamonds]

Copyright © 1977 by John D. MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of the author. First published in the Chicago Sun-Times.

I am not an expert on diamonds. I am pretty good at recovering stolen goods. I have had a lot of luck. Equity used to loan me out all over hell and gone until I got smart and set myself up as a consultant. A piece of the action is always better.

This time Equity was paying for my services. First time for them. I thought they were going to stay mad forever.

They briefed me and I left with the thirty-two big color prints of the thirty-two missing items. They had them made from the color slides the jeweler took of his merchandise, everything worth over three hundred dollars. For insurance purposes. A neat and orderly man, and a camera buff. Nice pictures, with a scale next to the item, and technical data on a separate sheet.

Equity is at Park and Fifty-fifth. I walked down to Forty-eighth, four doors west of Fifth Avenue, and waited until Wally Marks got through talking to some fat men from Amsterdam.

He is a totally hairless man. No eyebrows, eyelashes, or hair on the knuckles, even. I think it was a disease he had. He told me I looked bigger than he remembered, and I said I was actually smaller because lately I had more chances to work out. The idea of working out pained him.

I sat across the desk as he went through the thirty-two pictures and thirty-two sets of technical information. I tried to read him as he studied them. No way. A man who makes his living buying and selling diamonds is in a poker game every day. If you can read him, he goes broke.

“Flawless stuff,” I said.

He shrugged. “No such thing exists. All flawless means, according to FTC regulations, is that you can’t see any flaws with a ten-power glass. But at forty diopters you’ll see flaws. If I believe what it says here about cut and color and mounting, what you have here, Duke, is maybe six hundred thou wholesale.”

“You are twenty thousand higher than the insurance payoff.”

“Payoff?” He was startled.

“After six months of delays and some threats of legal action, good old Equity paid off.”

“Who got ripped?”

“Wescott and Sons. In Atlanta.”

He nodded. “Fancy place. Big stock. Hell, Duke, it would have to be a big stock.” He stared at his low ceiling for a few moments, fingers laced across his belly. “What somebody did,” he said at last, “they winnowed out the top standard items. Blue whites and whites. Your classic standard cuts. The biggest you’ve got here is four point nineteen carats. Quality, but anonymous quality. Some you could leave right in the settings. This one, for example. What you’ve got here is an eight-millimeter-round brilliant cut, two and a half carat, blue white; hand-crafted platinum setting with two fair-size baguettes. I could move that tomorrow, as is, for sixteen thousand five, without a fear in the world. But a lot of them would have to come out of the settings. Nobody took this stuff with the idea of selling it back to Equity.”

“So they finally decided.”

“Somebody has a channel to feed this stuff right back into the industry. Somebody had a lot of time in the vault to select these items and leave the fancy cuts behind. There’s no junk here. All these stones are salable, and probably already sold.”

“Somebody had a couple months in the vault.”

For an instant he looked startled and then said, “One of those, huh? Made substitutions?”

I took out my pocket notebook to make sure of the name. “Anne Farley. Trusted employee. Apparently she sneaked the photos and descriptions out one at a time and had pretty fair dupes made — good enough to fool the ignorant eye — saved them until the manager was away from the shop, switched the thirty-two items, and took off.”

I had one of the substitute items given me by Equity and I put it in front of him. A solitaire. He pushed at it with a thick white finger and said, “Garbage.”

“Workmanship?”

He picked it up. “Pretty good. Not bad.”

“Can it be traced by the workmanship?”

“Sure. Maybe fifteen thousand guys could do this, in this country. Ask them all. Has to be one of them.”

“Very funny.”

“Duke, somebody is laughing. Somebody made off with a half million in diamonds. Nice thing about them is there is hardly any bulk at all. All the great diamonds of the world would fit in one suitcase, and you could walk away with it. But it is an artificial market. Don’t invest for investment. Buy for pretty.”

“What’s wrong with investment?”

“Where they mine them, the countries are unstable. If they decide not to deal with the cartel, they could bust the price down to maybe ten percent of where it is. Fake scarcity keeps the price up.”

“Wally, what do I owe you for your time and advice?”

“Owe? Don’t talk about owe. Just tell me how you make out. On this one you are going to swing and miss.”

“That’s what Equity hopes. Then again, maybe they don’t. It’s their money.”

Wescott and Sons was in a new hotel/bank/office building, shopping plaza, and park complex — one of those places that look as if they have been designed for the elegant people of some remote time in the future; but until the future arrives, they will let us barbarians blunder around, hawking and spitting, gawping and exclaiming, spending all our money, and forgetting where we left our car.

The jewelry store had two entrances, one onto an exclusive little mall, the other opening into a corner of the lobby of a luxury hotel. The display windows, both in the lobby and on the mall, were little niches set behind a reflectionless curve of armored glass, where single items of great value rested on velvet, illuminated by the narrow beams from concealed spotlights.

The interior was deeply carpeted in a tufted blue. Ceiling spots shone down on glass cases, on the twinkle of gold watches, bracelets, chains, and charms, on the polished silver of cigarette cases, wedding gifts, and baby presents. There were some customers. The clerks were slender, pretty ladies, all dressed in gray skirts and white shirtwaist blouses, gold cuff links. A young one came to me and murmured shyly of her great wish to help me in any possible way. I said I would like to see the manager, J. Trevor Laneer, and she asked what about, and I said that it concerned Equity Protection and the recent settlement. She went away with my business card and came back in three minutes and begged me to please follow her.

Laneer stood up from his leather furniture and shook my hand. He was fifty trying to look thirty. Mod clothes, bright-blue contact lenses, forty-dollar hairstyling, and a bandito moustache. But the pouches under his eyes, the turkey neck, and the brown spots on the backs of his hands gave him away. His office was like an alcove in a club lounge. No desk. Clever diorama of the English countryside. He waved me down into a deep leather chair, smiled, and said, “Now then! How may I help you, Mr. Rhoades?”

“I’d like to ask you some questions about the robbery last year.”

His smile faded but slightly. He shook his head from side to side, almost regretfully. “Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Rhoades, but that is impossible. It really is. Five different people — two of them from Equity Protection — questioned me at great length over a period of many weeks, you know. They extracted every scrap of information from me. Surely all that material is on record, and if you have a legitimate purpose in all this, surely it will be available to you. Frankly, I am sick unto death of it. I was deceived by a person I trusted. It took far too long to get the insurance settlement. I feel I was treated badly. I needed money to replace stock. I deal with some very affluent people, and I cannot afford to have a stock so skimpy they get in the habit of going elsewhere. No, Mr. Rhoades. To me it is a closed book. And don’t quote the policy to me, the part about reasonable cooperation. I have cooperated. All I am going to. It is over. It cost the business twelve thousand dollars in interest on borrowed money to replenish my stock. I had to borrow against the settlement. I do not feel kindly toward Equity. Good day, sir.” He stood up and motioned toward the door. I stood up and walked out and he closed it behind me.