Carla Neggers - White Hot

“You’ve heard about the cat burglar, right?” Croc asked.

Jeremiah gritted his teeth. “No.”

“Oh.” He seemed momentarily taken aback. “I figured you’d be on the story, but maybe it’s too…I don’t know, too mundane for you or something.”

“Mundane? Croc, where’d you learn a word like mundane?”

“Television.” He grinned, his teeth reasonably healthy, if in need of routine dental care. He wore baggy jeans and a threadbare T-shirt, and his scraggly hair had recently been washed. He was just, so far as Jeremiah could tell, a mixed-up kid who lived on the edge and liked to be in the know. “Come on, Tabak, you telling me you haven’t heard a word about a jewel thief loose in the land of polo and croquet?”

“Not a word, Croc. So, what jewel thief, and what makes you suspect this Mollie Lavender?”

“Stay with me, okay? I’m onto something here, I can feel it. See, this guy’s hit maybe a half-dozen times in the past two weeks-thirteen days, to be precise. We’re not talking about your Cary Grant type who sneaks over rooftops and into people’s hotel rooms. He-or she-hits right out in the open at dinner parties, charity balls-you know, your high-class gigs. Someone makes a mistake, and next thing, they’re out a fifty-thousand-dollar bracelet.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

“You take off a piece of expensive jewelry for any reason-it’s too heavy, it’s got a loose clasp, somebody else is wearing an identical piece-and drop it in a pocket, a handbag, leave it for two seconds, and our thief sees it and takes advantage.”

“He’s an opportunist,” Jeremiah said, interested in spite of himself.

“Exactly. I figure he’s netted damned close to a half-million in jewelry so far, retail value. He’s worked as far south as Fort Lauderdale and as far north as Jupiter. That’s probably why the police haven’t put all the pieces together and figured out they have a clever jewel thief on their hands. Too many departments involved-they just haven’t compared notes yet. Once they do, the shit’ll hit the fan.”

“You’re just one step ahead.”

“Yep.”

“Any evidence this stuff was stolen and not just misplaced?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read the police reports. That’s where you come in. I don’t deal with officialdom, you know? You’re between stories, right? I figure you’re at a loose end, maybe you can help.”

“Croc, listen to me.” Jeremiah pushed aside his coffee mug and leaned over the table, the sun warm on his neck. “I find my own stories. I don’t work on assignment. And I can’t have you running around hunting up stories for me. I won’t be responsible for you getting hurt or stepping over the line, be it ethical or legal. You got it?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.” He seemed unoffended by the lecture. “This is just off the record. Friend to friend. Okay?”

Jeremiah wasn’t about to agree to any terms. And he didn’t consider Croc a friend-to-friend kind of friend, not when he didn’t know where he lived and wasn’t even sure he knew his real name. He said it was Blake Wilder, but he could have pulled the name out of a James Bond movie for all Jeremiah knew. But he couldn’t end it here and walk away, not until he’d heard Croc out. “Tell me about Mollie Lavender’s connection.”

“Ah.” He popped another ketchup-slathered fry into his mouth, looking smug, proud of himself for having survived another Tabak firestorm and pricked Jeremiah’s interest. “She’s the common denominator. She’s been at every gig that’s been hit. Every one, from a jazz party in Fort Lauderdale to cocktails with the opera society in Jupiter.”

“And how did you get this information?”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I have my ways.”

“I suppose you’ve had access to all the guests lists and have checked out every hanger-on and every journalist and every guest who brought someone at the last minute or turned their invitation over to a friend and-”

“Okay.” Croc was unruffled. “So she’s the only common denominator I’ve found so far.”

Jeremiah sat back, already regretting his outburst. If he thought about it, Croc might wonder why his reporter buddy was getting so upset about what was, in reality, just another weird lunch with an informant. “What’s the point here, Croc? Why the interest in this story?”

“It just kind of grabbed my attention. You going to check it out or what?”

“I don’t do Gold Coast jewel thieves.” Especially if they involved a woman he’d once slept with, something that didn’t bear thinking about with Croc’s beady eyes on him.

“Then just check into it for me, Tabak. As a favor.”

In two years, Jeremiah’s twitchy, independent, cagey, young informant had never asked him a favor. Money wasn’t an issue because Jeremiah would never pay for information, but Croc had never so much as asked for a ride across town. Whatever satisfaction he received from providing the occasional useful tidbit to a high-profile Miami reporter was his alone to understand. Croc’s main skill was to pull his tidbits, whether useful or ridiculous, seemingly out of thin air. Like Mollie Lavender as jewel thief.

“You’ve never asked a favor of me, Croc,” Jeremiah said, calmer. “Why now?”

“There’s something about this thing…I don’t know…” He pushed his plate aside, his food only half eaten, another departure from the norm. “You don’t have to write the story, Tabak. I don’t care about that. Really. If it’s not your thing, fine. Just look into it. You know, you’ve got sources and access that I don’t. You go through the front doors. I go through the garbage.”

“You don’t have to.” Jeremiah spoke quietly, trying to get his sincerity across to a kid who’d probably never had anyone in his life he could trust. “You’ve got good instincts. If you want a job at the paper, maybe there’s something I can do. You’d have to start at the bottom of the ladder-”

“But seeing how I’m in the gutter now, that’d be a step or two up.” He grinned suddenly, his gray eyes sparkling with self-deprecating humor. “You get used to the gutter, you know? After a while, you don’t fit in anywhere else.” He got to his feet, snagging two last fries. “I’ll be in touch.”

“You don’t want to stay for dessert?”

“Nah. Mollie Lavender, Palm Beach. Cary Grant loose on the Gold Coast. You got it?”

Jeremiah might have had a hot knife twisting in his gut. “I’ve got it.”

Eight hours later, Jeremiah sat in his beat-up, disreputable truck, his prize possession, outside the exclusive Greenaway Club in Boca Raton, just south of Palm Beach. His was the only pre-1990 vehicle-never mind the only truck-he’d seen in the last hour. This was the Florida Gold Coast, another world from the one he covered, and lived in, fifty miles to the south.

He had shocked the hell out of the Miami Tribune ’s gossip columnist when he surfaced in her office looking for information on tonight’s goings-on up the coast. A classical dessert concert at the Greenaway had struck him as the most promising for Leonardo Pascarelli’s goddaughter and a flute-player-turned-publicist.

He had not explained his interest. Helen Samuel, a million-year-old chain-smoking Trib fixture, had winked at him and said, “You don’t have to explain, Tabak. I’ll find out on my own.”

She would, too, which was something Jeremiah refused to think about on the trip north, 95 clogged with tourists and locals enjoying the balmy winter Wednesday evening.

He had his windows rolled down. Orchestral music floated across the manicured lawn of a pink stucco mansion designed by society architect Addison Mizner in 1920 and now the posh Greenaway Club. The soft chords mingled with the sounds of crickets, ocean, and wind, creating a sense of luxury and relaxation that he resisted. This was not the Florida Jeremiah knew. His Florida was the Everglades outpost where he’d grown up with his widowed father, and it was the diverse, pulsing, sometimes violent, sometimes sublime streets of Miami. There were days when he wondered if south Florida should have been declared a national park a hundred years ago, its land left to the birds, the alligators, the panthers, the hurricanes. The bugs.