Carla Neggers - White Hot

Hurling himself to his feet with sudden energy, Jeremiah made his way through the sea of desks and reporters in the big, open Trib newsroom and down the corridor to the separate offices of the arts and entertainment and leisure sections. Helen Samuel had her own office, one, because no one could stand her smoking, and, two, because no one could stand her. Her abrasiveness aside, she was an old-style gossip columnist who prided herself on knowing what was fair game and what wasn’t. A jewel thief on the loose in Palm Beach was right up her alley.

“This is too good, Tabak,” she said when he appeared in her doorway. She stuffed out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. “You sucking up to me for information two days in a row is worth a line in my column, except you’re too goddamned boring. If you kept company with something besides reptiles, I could work with it.” She flashed dark, incisive eyes at him. “You don’t sleep with your lizard, do you?”

“Helen, you make most of my informants seem downright respectable.”

“They’re cockroaches. I’m a professional. Close the door and sit down. I presume you don’t want anyone listening in on our conversation?”

“I’m not hiding my interest-”

“Sure you are.” She waved a tiny, bony hand. She lied about all her personal stats, but she had to be seventy, she couldn’t be over five feet, she weighed at most a hundred pounds, and she prided herself on never having gone “under the knife.” Jeremiah couldn’t imagine what a face-lift could do for her. Rumor had it she’d looked like Loretta Young in her youth. He couldn’t picture it. She pointed at the door. “Shut it. Sit.”

Jeremiah shut the door and sat.

Helen tapped another cigarette out of a sequined case. If lung disease or heart disease did her in, she would only say it saved her from a lonely retirement. She’d been declaring she planned to go out of her office on a gurney long before Jeremiah had arrived at the Trib eighteen years ago as a college student working part-time. Most of her colleagues thought she’d simply ossify first. One of the janitors swore she didn’t go home at night. “She’s really a mummy,” he liked to tell Jeremiah. “You just think she’s alive.”

Jeremiah eased back in the ratty vinyl-covered chair. The tiny office reeked of stale smoke. Helen sat with an unlit cigarette expertly tucked between callused forefinger and middle finger. “So,” she said with a hint of victory in her hoarse voice, “you’re on the cat burglar story.”

He grimaced. “I’m just nosing around. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

“I haven’t taken a vacation in ten years. Don’t believe in ’em. Of course, I can plant my fanny on a cruise ship and call it work. You and me, Tabak, we’re not so different.” She grinned at his stricken expression. “Ha, scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? This work’s either in your blood or it isn’t. It’s in yours.”

“I have a life, Helen.”

“Yep, and it’s the job. Might as well make your peace with it now, save you a lot of heartache in the future. Don’t worry, you won’t end up like me.” She grinned, a hint, indeed, of Loretta Young in the sparkle of her dark eyes. “You don’t smoke.”

Jeremiah reined in any impulse to argue with her. He was not like Helen Samuel. He would never be like Helen Samuel. Thirty years from now, he would not be sitting behind a crummy desk in a crummy office talking Gold Coast gossip with a young investigative reporter. He would be…what? He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. But damned if he’d be an aging, chain-smoking, cynical gossip columnist with a warped sense of humor.

“If you don’t object,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you know about this jewel thief.”

“Know? I don’t know shit. But I’ve heard a few things.”

She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and fumbled for a lighter as ancient as she was. Jeremiah waited impatiently. When she had the cigarette lit and had taken a deep drag and blown what smoke didn’t get sucked into her lungs into his air space and still didn’t go on, he groaned. “Helen, if you’re going to make me beg for every word…”

“Beg? You, Tabak? Wait, lemme get a photographer in here. We’ll print it on page one.”

He glared at her.

She waved her cigarette at him, ash flicking off onto her blotter. “Oh, you love it. Playing the big, bad reporter. Anybody who hasn’t been around as long as I have is scared shitless of you. Which means everyone else in the goddamned building. Okay, here’s the poop.” She laid her cigarette on her ashtray, getting down to business. “So this little bastard’s hit eight, ten times in the last couple weeks.”

“Seven times in fourteen days, including last night at the Greenaway.”

“Yeah, whatever. Facts are your department.” She grinned, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “Okay. At first, nobody thinks anything. Maybe it’s robbery, or maybe it’s some daffy socialite who forgot to put on her jewels and would rather cry cat burglar than admit it, or maybe it’s an insurance scam. You know, all these baubles are insured. Pretty convenient, if not suspicious, that none of the victims has been hurt or has seen a thing.”

“No witnesses?”

“Nope. None that are talking, anyway. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth hit that people starting admitting they’ve got a problem on their hands.”

“The police?”

“They’re investigating. The different departments involved are coordinating. I mean, that’s what I hear. I make a practice of not talking to the police if I can help it. But the modus operandi for each hit is the same-the guy strikes at parties, not sneaking into an unoccupied home or hotel room like your typical cat burglar, and takes advantage of the least little mistake. I guess people are regarding him as a cat burglar because he hasn’t been seen-he’s not sticking people up, just slipping into their pockets and handbags unnoticed.”

“Bold,” Jeremiah said.

“And observant as hell.”

“So he must be in a position to watch the crowd without drawing attention.”

“He or she,” Helen amended pointedly.

“You think it’s a woman?”

She shrugged, plucking her cigarette from its position on her ashtray, taking a quick drag, and replacing it again, a half-inch of ash dropping into the mound. “Something about this jewel thief’s different. Maybe it’s gender, I don’t know. You were at the Greenaway last night?”

He nodded.

Helen rocked back in her chair, thinking. Jeremiah could imagine her applying her decades of experience with people, with the Gold Coast, with a world, he thought, with which he was largely unfamiliar. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a socialite wearing a diamond-encrusted salamander brooch. She notices the clasp is loose and tucks it into the pocket of her Armani jacket and forgets about it. When it gets a little warm, she takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of her chair. Later in the evening, she puts the jacket on, remembers the brooch, dips her hand into her pocket, and, lo and behold, it’s gone. She gets security, they search everywhere, but no salamander.”

“That doesn’t mean it was stolen.”

“Two weeks ago, probably no one would have thought a thing of it. Now, it fits the pattern.”

“How much was the brooch worth?”

“Thirty grand. It’s covered by insurance.”

“Has anyone else come forward who lost jewelry before the last two weeks and now thinks it might have been the work of our thief?”

Helen shook her head, iron-gray wisps dripping out of the mass of bobby pins she used to keep her hair up. “Not yet.”

Jeremiah ran the slim set of facts through his mind. “People scared?”