Curse of the Jade Lily

The last time I saw Vincent Donatucci, he handed me a check for $3,128,584.50. My first thought when I found him standing outside my front door—I ain’t giving it back!

“Hello, McKenzie,” he said when I opened the door.

“Mr. Donatucci,” I replied. A man makes you an instant millionaire, you call him mister. I opened the door wide enough to give him room to pass. “Come in.”

He crossed the threshold and stamped the cold from his feet. He unbuttoned his gray trench coat but did not take it off. He looked around. All he saw was a painting I had bought at the Lowertown Arts Festival hanging on the near wall and a lot of empty carpet.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“I moved in not long after I collected the reward on Teachwell.”

Donatucci nodded meaningfully.

“Beer?” I asked. “Coffee?”

He glanced at his watch. It was eleven twenty in the
A.M.

“Coffee,” he said.

I led him to the kitchen, deliberately taking the route through the dining room so he could see that I had a table, chairs, and matching buffet. It was a large house and expensive. I bought it for my father and me, but he died soon after we moved in, and I hadn’t done much with it since. Five of the rooms were still empty, although the master bedroom and bath were fully and, I like to think, tastefully decorated. So was what Dad called the family room, a large hall filled with a big-screen HDTV, Blu-ray DVD player, computer, CD stereo, plenty of chairs and sofas, including a two-hundred-year-old rocking chair, a large desk, floor lamps, and shelves filled with music, movies, and books. I was particularly fond of the kitchen where I stored all manner of culinary gadgets—mini-doughnut, sno-cone, and popcorn machines, iced tea maker, ice cream churn, pizza oven, pasta maker, a miniature guillotine used to halve bagels, a couple of toasters, and a $1,300 Jura-Capresso coffee and espresso maker that I snapped up for seven-fifty.

I poured Donatucci a mug of coffee, but none for myself. I watched intently while he sipped.

“Mmm, nice,” he said.

I don’t know why it was important that he be impressed. I guess I didn’t want him to think I squandered the money.

Donatucci settled at the kitchen table, grunting and sighing as if every movement were an effort for him. He was old, with a face so deeply wrinkled that I wondered how he shaved; more wrinkles than when I had first met him six years ago. He stared out the kitchen window into my backyard.

“May I take your coat?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and I wondered for a moment if he had heard me. “Mr. Donatucci?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Cookie?”

“Hmm?”

“I have a boatload of Girl Scout Cookies—Thin Mints, Samoas…”

He shook his head no.

“So tell me,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hmm?”

“What brings you here?”

“Are those pet turkeys?”

Donatucci was watching the thirteen wild turkeys that gathered around my frozen pond. They were loitering in a large space where I had packed down the snow with a shovel and my boots. In the center of the area was a wooden box. I had piled dry corn and grain on top of the box, and the turkeys were taking turns picking at it.

“No, not pets,” I said. “They showed up last year just before it started to snow. They must have liked it, because they came back again this year. I have a pal with the DNR who says they come into the city during the winter to forage for easy meals—I’m not the only one who feeds them. He says they’ll return to the wild come spring, although I don’t know what he means by the wild. The suburbs, I guess.”

Donatucci nodded, sipped his coffee, and watched the turkeys some more. He seemed to be drifting off, and I called his name.

“I’m not deaf, McKenzie,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“I’ve been keeping tabs on you.”

“Really?”

“People we make big payouts to, I like to keep an eye on them, see how the money changes them.”

“Does the money change them?”

“Always. Always it changes them. Sometimes for the better. They become philanthropists, you know? Share the wealth. Most of the others, they become prisoners to their money. Not always their fault, though. Suddenly everyone wants a piece. Friends turn on them, usually out of resentment. Most end up wishing they could go back to the way it was before they were rich. And then there’s you. You became Batman.”

“Hardly.”

Donatucci snorted. “Everything but the cape and the car,” he said. “Tearing around, working with the cops; sometimes working against the cops; doing good for goodness’ sake. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong.”

He snorted again.

“Mr. Donatucci, exactly what is it that you want?”

“I need a favor,” he said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it, now that you’re not with the police anymore? Favors for friends.”

“You’re not my friend.”

Donatucci smiled slightly. “You owe us,” he said.

“Us?”

“Midwest Farmers Insurance Group.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Three million one hundred and twenty-eight thousand—”

“That was a business deal, pure and simple,” I said.

“—five hundred and eighty-four dollars and fifty cents.”

“And if you could have avoided paying it, you would have.”

Donatucci groaned slightly as he adjusted his position in the chair. He was a big man, someone you would have stepped aside from when he was young and limber. Not so much now.

“No insurance company pays off on a claim if it doesn’t have to,” he said.

“Then let’s not talk about owing favors, all right?”

Donatucci took a long swallow of his coffee and then fixed his eyes on me. “Have you ever heard of the Jade Lily?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’s been advertised pretty heavily.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait, wait, wait. Okay. There’s a museum in Minneapolis that’s been sending flyers. It even called a couple of times looking for donations. It has an art exhibit—the Jade Lily. Apparently there’s a curse attached to it like King Tut’s tomb. Something terrible is supposed to happen to whoever possesses it.”

“Exactly right.”

“What about it?”

Donatucci handed his empty mug to me. I asked if he would like a refill and he said yes. While I was pouring the coffee he answered my question. He spoke abruptly as if he wanted to see if my hand shook.

“It was stolen last night,” Donatucci said.

I finished filling the mug and gave it to him. “So?”

“We want it back.”

“We?”

“Midwest Farmers insured it for three-point-eight million.”

“Why come to me? Call the cops. Call the FBI.” I gestured toward Donatucci like a host welcoming a contestant to a game show. “I remember you were a fair investigator once.”

“Still am.”

“Well, then?”

“Where were you last night, McKenzie?”

“Are you asking if I have an alibi, Mr. Donatucci? Why would you ask?”

I had one. I was at the Minnesota Wild hockey game with Bobby Dunston, who coincidentally held the rank of commander in the Major Crimes and Investigations Division of the St. Paul Police Department. Yet I had no intention of telling Donatucci that. Come into my house and demand an alibi—screw that. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against my kitchen counter.

“Any other favors you want?” I asked.

Donatucci waved his mug at me. “This is good coffee,” he said.

“Yes, it is.”

“You’re upset.”

“Not particularly. Just impatient.”

“I didn’t want to come here, McKenzie. I think it’s unethical.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I need a favor.”

“We’re back to that, are we?”

“The Jade Lily was stolen from the City of Lakes Art Museum last night. At eight o’clock this morning, the artnappers placed a call to the museum’s executive director, a woman named Perrin Stewart.”

“Artnappers?” I said.

“What else would you call them?”

“You tell me.”

“The artnappers told Ms. Stewart that they were willing to sell the Lily back to the museum for a third of its insured value. It goes against my better judgment, but we agreed—my company and the museum agreed. We have a couple of days to get the cash together, and then the artnappers will contact us with instructions.”

“I can appreciate why it pisses you off, Mr. Donatucci. Yet this sort of thing happens all the time, am I right?”

“Not all the time, but yeah, it happens. That’s pretty much how you got your money, if memory serves.”

“So why are you here against your better judgment?”

“We want to hire you to act as go-between—deliver the money, retrieve the Lily. We’ll pay you ten percent of the ransom.”

“You must be kidding.”

“No, I’m not.”

I started laughing just the same. “No, no, no,” I said.

“McKenzie…”

“Not a chance.”

“One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“I don’t care if it’s a million. A guy could get killed doing that sort of thing, and luckily for me—thanks to the Midwest Farmers Insurance Group—I don’t need the money.”

“That’s what I told them you’d say.”

“Them?”

“The museum board and my boss.”

“Wait a minute. Coming to me, that wasn’t your idea?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, whose idea was it?”

“The thieves.”

“What?”

“They asked for you. They said, ‘Send McKenzie with the money or it’s no deal.’”

That threw me. I turned my back on Donatucci and took a long time filling a mug with coffee for myself. I slowly sat at the table across from Donatucci and stared at the turkeys.

They asked for me,
my inner voice said.
Me? Why would they do that?

Donatucci watched and waited.

“Who are those guys?” I asked.

“Have you ever done this sort of thing before?”

“Act as a go-between?”

Donatucci nodded.

I explained that there had been two occasions. The first was when I delivered the ransom after Bobby Dunston’s daughter was kidnapped, but all the people involved in that incident were either dead or in prison. The only other time was when I helped out a woman named Jenny, an acquaintance from the old neighborhood who had married really, really well—at least that’s what I thought at the time. Unfortunately, her husband cared more about making money than he did about her, and Jenny drifted into an affair with a man she had met on the Internet. They arranged to meet at a hotel. When she woke the next morning, he was gone and so were the jewels her husband had given her—matching necklace, earrings, and brooch. The thief offered to sell the jewels back before Jenny’s husband missed them—sell them for more than they were worth—and she agreed. I handled the exchange. I went to a motel and waited in the room the thief had designated. When he called, I left the money in the room and went to a second room that he specified. That’s where I found the jewelry. I packed it up, and after a few minutes I went home. I never saw the thief.

“He was penny ante,” I said. “I doubt he could manage a caper like this. Besides, he didn’t know my name.”

“The thieves know you from somewhere,” Donatucci said.

“Just because they know me doesn’t mean I know them.”

“That’s true. The thieves could have heard your name somewhere. Where would they have heard your name, McKenzie?”

I shook my head slowly even as I wondered the same thing myself.

“You keep saying thieves,” I said.

“There are at least two,” Donatucci said. “Unfortunately, we can only ID the man who walked out of the museum with the Lily tucked under his arm.”

“Who was that?”

Donatucci smiled. There was this girl in high school; because of her I joined the chess club. The president of the chess club was a good guy, backed up the starting point guard on the school basketball team. He would smile just like Donatucci when I fell into one of his traps, which was just about every time we played.

“C’mon,” I said. “Don’t do this to me.”

Donatucci smiled some more. “Do what, Batman?” he said.

“Give me a break.”

“My advice, McKenzie? Forget the whole thing.”

I knew what Donatucci was trying to do, and I wasn’t going for it.

“You know what?” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do—forget the whole thing.”