Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

Harold Saroyan said, “I knew the minute I held it up but to make you feel better, I had a look inside. No doubt.”

I said, “What did holding it up do?”

“Showed me it has no pleochroism — doesn’t break up light the way a ruby does. Rubies are double-refractive, the light divides at two different speeds. Spinels are single-refractive, you don’t get a prismatic effect. The look inside said the same thing. Spinels have eight-, sometimes twelve-sided crystals. Rubies have six. This one has twelve.”

Milo said, “What’s it worth?”

Saroyan: “Nice spinel, this size? A few thousand dollars. Maybe you could get five.”

“Thousand.”

Elie said, “That’s the point. Not millions.”

Milo sat back in his chair. He’d lost color. I knew what he was thinking.

All those lives for this.

He said, “Obviously, the British Museum wasn’t conned, so it was probably switched with a ruby sometime later.”

Saroyan tugged at the knot of his tie. “Not necessarily, Lieutenant. Dealers in Asia caught on a long time ago but Europeans took longer to get educated. Years ago, a nice blue stone was a sapphire, a nice red stone was a ruby. There’s a big spinel in the British Imperial State Crown that everyone thought was a ruby. Many other situations like that.”

Elie said, “Czars and kings thought they knew what they were getting. They didn’t.”

Saroyan lifted the gem, rubbed it between his fingers. “A little softer than a ruby, seven and a half, eight on the Mohs scale instead of nine for a ruby, but that’s still pretty hard. Making it more confusing, spinels are found where rubies are. They’re actually rarer than rubies. So why aren’t they more valuable?”

He shrugged. “That’s gemstones, it’s all about mystique. Like with women — models. Photographer wants a blonde, pretty brunettes don’t get hired.”

Milo said, “But sometimes brunettes are called for.”

Saroyan said, “True. But so far, the market wants only blondes.”

I said, “So there wasn’t necessarily a substitution.”

“I looked at the pictures of the museum exhibition, sir. No way to know for certain from an old photograph, but I took my time going over it and found facets that are identical to this stone. If I had to bet, it’s the one the Egyptian owned.”

Milo said, “No one would know different until they tried to sell it.”

“Maybe even after they tried to sell it, Lieutenant. Sometimes people aren’t careful. Sometimes they lie.”

“Okay, thanks, gentlemen,” said Milo. “Appreciate your coming down and sorry it was a waste of time.”

“Not a waste,” said Saroyan. “It’s an interesting story. My age, you start to collect stories more than money.”

The four of us exited Hertzberg together. Saroyan got into a gleaming black Mercedes S300, Elie into an equally pampered silver version of the same model.

I said, “So many opportunities for a swindle. Whoever sold it to the Egyptian and who knows how many before that, then onward to the jeweler who consigned with Drancy, Drancy, Hoke, Thalia.”

“Not Demarest,” Milo said. “Idiot. You think Thalia stuck what she thought was a fortune on top of a lamp?”

I said, “That’s the assumption I want to live with.”

“Why?”

“Her having a sense of humor.”

We reached the car. I asked him when I could go public.

He said, “What the hell, nothing to hide anymore.”

“Then hold on for a sec.”

I punched a preset on my cell. Maxine Driver answered at her office.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “About to start office hours. Whining sophomores wanting their grades changed.”

“Keep ’em waiting in the hall, I’ve got a story for you.”

I gave her the basics. Surprisingly short tale.

She said, “That was definitely worth waiting for. You’ve restored my faith in humanity.”

I hung up without comment. But as I drove out of the crime lab parking lot, I thought: What a wrong way to put it.

Nearly a year after the murder of Thalia Mars, I was invited to a celebration at the Outpatient Division of Western Peds. Normally, I beg off that kind of thing. This time I put on a suit and tie and asked Robin to keep me company.

For the past eleven months, I’d tried to put Thalia behind me with pretty good success. After I’d arranged transfer of her tiny body from the crypt to the mortuary at Forest Lawn in Burbank, I’d selected a hillside plot with a view of a major TV studio, movie lots, and low-rise sprawl.

Scoring her a place near the love of her life would’ve been a nice touch but no room at Hollywood Legends.

No gravestones in this place, so I didn’t need to order one. Everyone got a generic brass plaque installed flat on the emerald turf.

I had composed the text, kept it simple. Name, dates of birth and death denoting an incredibly long life, a quote from Lord Byron. Because he’d sired a genius and was as good a poet as any.

I knew it was love and I felt it was glory.

And that was that.

“Good cause,” I told Robin. “Also, there’s seeing you in that red dress.”

She said, “What makes you think I’ll wear the red dress?”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “Why not, indeed. I do look hot in it.”

The party had been postponed several times, held up for months as Thalia’s estate was fine-toothed by the IRS and the state Franchise Tax Board. Every charity listed in the will vetted repeatedly and repetitively, in the hope of finding something unkosher and open to confiscation.

Ricki Sylvester had done a fine job as an estate lawyer but her implication in the murders gave both agencies an additional excuse to comb the will for symptoms of impropriety. Then there was the matter of Sylvester’s will and her instruction that both documents needed to be considered as “an entity.” After that, meetings, memos, a whole bunch of head-scratching at progressively higher levels of government authority.

I knew nothing about the logjam, was enjoying a bottle from the case of Chivas Blue that Milo had sent me right after closing the case, when Ruben Eagle called.

I’d held on to Milo’s gift card. Inscribed Early Christmas.

With him, it never stops.

Ruben’s call was about getting a neuropsych referral for a child with hard-to-categorize seizure disorder. I gave three names of great people, then asked how it felt to be well funded.

He said, “Not yet.”

“What’s holding it up?”

“No idea.”

I phoned the hospital’s chief lawyer for development, gave him a rundown of the Drancy robbery and the likely illegal federal confiscation of privately owned bijoux.

“That might be something I can use,” he said. “I assume you don’t want to be quoted.”

“Good guess.”

“Hmm... well I’m not sure how I can use it... but thanks.”

Two weeks later, the funds were released in full. Including the spinel, which sold to a gem broker in Atlanta for forty-five hundred dollars.

What happened to it after that, I have no idea.

Same for whether or not my call actually had anything to do with freeing Thalia’s estate.

What I did know was that Phil Duke, claiming he’d never fired a weapon in his life and that Henry Bakstrom had shot Gerard Waters and been shot, in turn, by Deandra Demarest, had been allowed to plead down to voluntary manslaughter.

Eighteen-year sentence. At his age, that could turn out to be life.

His sole request: a prison “where they have a theater program.”

Robin and I arrived at the party ten minutes late.

Cake, soda pop, bottled water for the virtuous, everything set up in a room near the hospital chapel.