Death by Diamonds (15 page)

“Manny,” Pierpont said, “post a couple of your men in the hall, so no one can come in or out without being seen.”

Wow, he had a team of security guards, but then he owned a diamond mine. No telling what treasures needed protecting.

“My father kept a fortune in antique jewels up here,” Pierpont added, “and I haven’t had a chance to sort them out since his death. Too painful, you understand.”

“I’ll post a guard,” said Manny with the sore toe. After the hall door closed, we heard their voices and footsteps receding.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark by then and I could see the guilty look on Werner’s face.

“Is that a Taser in your pocket,” I whispered, “or are you just happy to see me?”

Thirty-three

I wanted this, I wanted to do this, but my work is me, and it has to be right.

—OSCAR DE LA RENTA

Werner nearly knocked over the sit-up board trying to get out of there and away from me.

“What did you mark on the wall in there?” I asked, letting him and his physical interest off the hook. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it at all, but, well, I’m not dead or stupid.

“I found a bug,” he whispered against my ear. “Somebody has this place bugged. Let’s see if we can find any others, and shush while we do.”

We searched, and I found one beneath the top shelf of an end table almost hidden by a leg. I raised my hand and pointed.

Werner pointed to another beneath a rowing machine.

I dragged Werner into the bedroom, and we checked for bugs in there, but it seemed clear. The listener might be scum but at least he/she wasn’t a perv.

“How are we going to get out of here with a guard posted?” I asked in a whisper. Werner shrugged and went to look out a window. I did the same. We looked out several but the roof was full of peaks and gables, and it wasn’t covered in normal shingles. Oh no, the rich so-and-so’s who built this place used what looked like blue slate or ceramic tiles, hand crafted to fit the round towers giving them the kind of texture that would catch at your clothes and break your heels.

“It does have a step-down effect,” Werner said.

“I’m wearing a Coco Chanel dress, and I mean, a dress Coco herself wore.”

“Your point?”

“I’d rather go out in handcuffs.”

“You mean, it’s valuable?”

“Museum quality.” Amazingly, I caught a whiff of Dom’s perfume and followed the scent. On the bedroom side of the wall, opposite the closet we’d been hiding in, the scent got strong and lingered. There I found cuts in the wallpaper, except that this cutout was in the shape of a door . . . that wouldn’t budge.

I pushed a button built into only one of a set of ceramic wall sconces on either side of the door cut, and the outlined panel slid into a pocket wall. “An elevator!”

Werner whipped around.

Inside, we closed the door and pushed B, since we assumed that meant basement, and the button sat below the other choices, like floors two and one. We’d been on three. “I’ll be damned,” Werner said. “Now if it doesn’t deposit us into a room full of security guards, we’re aced.”

Werner leaned against his corner and I against mine. “Dominique’s perfume is strong in here,” I said. “I think she was Victor’s lover. No, more than that, I think they were in love.”

“And you know this because?”

“I have good instincts. I’d like to look into Victor Pierpont’s death. I think Pierce lied about what killed his father. Dom led me to believe that Victor’s cancer had been cured.”

Well, she had, in a roundabout way.

The lift opened at the base of a curved, narrow, dark, metal gray staircase, in a tall, dank, light gray tower basement vestibule, plain, no frills, near what looked to be an outside door. I tried the knob. “It’s locked.”

“It’s a deadbolt. It needs a key to unlock it from the inside.” Werner nosed around the top of the door frame, the base of the stairs, ran his hands up the newel, and found that the knob finial was set inside the newel with a wide cutoff dowel. Beneath the dowel stump, he found a key and held it up for my inspection.

I silently applauded. “I’m duly impressed.”

“As a cop, you see all kinds of things,” he said, “like jewels in dug-up caskets,” but he couldn’t seem to get the key in the lock.

I took it from his nervous hand and successfully unlocked the door.

“Not a word,” he said.

I saluted. Cracking the door revealed a small corner of the small backyard covered in a dusting of snow.

Werner replaced the key, followed me out, and gave me his coat. We managed to completely cross the yard along the edges of a dry-stemmed winter garden, stepping from stem clump to stem clump, so as not to leave footprints in the snow.

When two security guards came out, one of them limping—Manny—we acted like we were heading back to the house from the mermaid fountain.

“There you are,” Pierpont said following them out.

“When you weren’t with us at the end of the tour, I wondered what happened to you. I honestly thought you’d invaded my father’s private quarters, you were so curious.”

“Wow,” I said. “Wish I’d thought of it. I am curious. What’s up there?”

“My father was a private man. He deeded me the house with a contractual stipulation that I stay out of his wing. I figured it was a small price to pay. I just went up there for the first time since his death, all contracts being void under the circumstances. Anyway, it’s ugly. You didn’t miss a thing. Aren’t you cold?”

What a liar, I thought. He’d had the place bugged. He’d been up there all right, maybe only when his father was in the hospital, but he’d been there.

Werner put a protective arm around me. “Mad was missing Dominique and needed a minute.”

“Funny,” Pierpont said, “I smell Dom’s perfume all over you, Madeira.”

“They gave me her room last night. And I couldn’t help myself this morning. Wearing a spritz of it made me feel a bit closer to her, which I needed under the circumstances.”

“I didn’t notice it on our tour.”

“Of course you didn’t. It was mixed with the perfume and aftershave everyone else was wearing.”

He tilted his head in a silent “touché.” “Well, come inside,” Pierpont said. “We have films of Dominique that we hoped would console everyone and make them feel a bit closer to her.”

He took my arm, as if he didn’t trust me. I couldn’t imagine why. He sat in a chair up front to narrate and I stood in the back to mentally fit all the off-sized and oddly shaped puzzle pieces together.

“I can’t believe you got out without being caught,” Eve whispered, pulling me behind the stairs. “I nearly had a heart attack.”

“Where were you all that time?” I asked.

“Creating a diversion to buy you some time. We got Pierpont and the security guards’

attention, I’ll tell you.”

“How?”

“Kyle keyed Pierpont’s gold stretch Lamborghini in front of the house.”

Thirty-four

Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.

—BILL BLASS

“Don’t worry about the Lamborghini,” Kyle said later as we climbed the stairs to Dom’s house after we dropped my father and Aunt Fiona off at the train station. “Keying the limo was my idea, and I intend to pay for having it repaired.”

“I expect nothing less of you,” I said, “but what excuse will you give? Like, from the kindness of your heart, you’re going to—”

“Because it happened during my mother’s funeral collation, which Pierpont so generously hosted, I feel it only fair that the damage expense be mine.”

“Ah, okay. But I’m surprised Pierpont wasn’t more furious.”

“Oh, he was,” Eve said. “He threatened to kill the person who did it, which is probably why finding you in his backyard didn’t faze him the way it might have earlier. He was pretty steamed when he thought you went to the top floor.”

“I wonder why?” I said, cryptically. “Do you think it’s possible that Pierce doesn’t know about his father’s elevator?” I asked Werner.

Kyle turned to us before he opened the door. “Victor had the elevator put in while Pierce was in Europe a few years ago. Victor gave Pierce’s security goons a vacation and let the construction crew go to town. Father and son may have lived in the same house, but they were estranged.”

“Weird arrangement if you ask me,” Eve muttered.

“Victor would have given the house to charity if Pierce broke their agreement about him staying out of his father’s wing.”

“He did break it,” Werner said. “The den is bugged, but the bedroom doesn’t seem to be.”

“Someday,” Kyle said. “I hope that Pierce gets what’s coming to him.”

“Which reminds me,” Werner said, turning my way. “During the movie about Dom, I found my way back to the tower, and I relocked the door from the inside.”

“You ruthless housebreaker. You’ve arrested me and Eve for less.”

“I’m a house locker, not a breaker. I should possibly be arrested for aiding and abetting, but you’re the one who was snooping. I was simply trying to rescue you.”

“My hero,” I said, taking his arm to go inside as Nick opened the door to greet us.

“Nick, you’re back. What a nice surprise. Did you find the diamonds?”

“Ladybug,” he said, taking me away from Werner with an arm around my waist, “I’ve been looking forward to our reunion.”

“After a day and a half?” I asked. “Hey, before I forget, tell the Feds that Victor Pierpont’s apartment was bugged and I’m afraid he might have been murdered, too.”

Nick sighed. “Shut up, Mad.”

I tilted my head. “I’ll bug you until you report the bugs.”

“I’ll do it after our reunion.”

“Feeling friskier than when you left, are you?”

“Don’t remind me.” He lifted me in his arms and headed for the stairs.

“Hey, where are we going?” I asked, suddenly remembering Werner’s clothes and luggage in my room.

“To reunite,” Nick said, wiggling his brows.

“Nick, I’m pretty wrung out.”

He slowed and gave me a questioning look.

I lay my head on his shoulder. “I buried my friend today.”

“Ladybug, I’m sorry.” His heart beneath my head slowed with his steps. In other words, he stopped thinking with his zipper brain. And after he did, he kissed my brow. “Tough day, hey? I’ll take care of you.”

We were not talking about the same kind of taking care of. “How did you get back so fast? I thought you were going all the way to Plaidivostock or something?”

“Slovenia,” he corrected. “I searched the plane in flight and found what Gregor and I both thought were the diamonds. But, guess what, we didn’t know until we got back to FBI headquarters, here in New York, that Gregor had stuffed cubic zirconias into the ceramic vial on his person.”

“Ceramic?” I asked.

“Hard to detect in an X-ray.”

“Ah.” Diamonds fit into small places, like pill bottles that could be stuffed into plumbing traps, ceramic vials that could be stuffed I didn’t want to know where, or . . . clear glass jars, with or without gel, like the ones somebody in a black raincoat watched Dom switch?

If Gregor had the cubic zirconias that I originally put on the dress, what happened to the real diamonds, I wondered, and why did Dom switch the gel jars?

Lightbulb moment: Dominique hid the diamonds—to protect or steal them. Being Dom I suspect she wanted to protect them. Which meant that she had worn cubic zirconias for the final act the night she died. I knew because I’d seen her in her bedroom taking the CZs from their settings and replacing them with rhinestones.

Hah, I finally understood my vision from last night, the night Werner spent with me. Oh scrap, I also remembered a kiss, a zing-me-to-my-toes, curl-my-hair, fly-me-to-the-moon kiss, in my bed. I mean, Dom’s bed, where I’d slept, and not alone. Was the Wiener just generally a scrumpdillyicious kisser? Or had he known who he was kissing? Did that have anything to do with upping the sensuality level? Erp!

“You’ve gone quiet,” Nick said.

I stopped biting my lip and focused on my on again’s worried face. Such a gorgeous, loyal face. Guilt, guilt, guilt. “Cubic zirconias, hey?”

Dim-witted comeback, Mad, I told myself, feeling like a foolish traitor. “Call the Feds about the bugs on the third floor at Pierpont’s now, will you?”

Nick set me on the floor in Dom’s bedroom and made the call, and while he did, he looked around.

After he hung up, I saw the room through his eyes. Nick went from holding his hands on his hips to sticking them in his pockets.

His actions sent a mixed message, and I found myself crossing my arms defensively. We both looked around. Unmade bed. Men and women’s clothes, including underwear, strewn everywhere. Yep, we were in a hurry all right.

It looked like hurricane Madeira had gone through here. Good one, Madeira. Nick went to the bed to touch the indentations in both pillows. “Sleepover?” he asked. I nodded, a little too enthusiastically, though it hadn’t been much more than that.

“I’d buy Eve wearing men’s clothes,” he said, “but I don’t buy her packing a red jock sock.”

“Excuse me,” Werner said, coming through the door we’d left open and snatching said jock sock from Nick’s hand. “I need to pack my bags and move them upstairs.”

Son of a stitch!

Thirty-five

The expression a woman wears on her face is more important than the clothes she wears on her back.

—DALE CARNEGIE

Nick paced at the foot of the bed, looking mighty yummy in his scruffy jeans and leather jacket, his dark hair mussed and extra wavy. “Did you two sleep together last night?” he asked.

I winced. “Define sleep.”

Werner pointed to his scabbing brow. “I was unconscious. She Tasered me. I figure the floor did the rest. In my book, that’s not called foreplay.”

Nick’s whole body relaxed. “Why did you beat the crap out of him, Mad?”

“Because I was half unconscious, myself, and there was a man coming into my room. You had already left.”

Nick shrugged. “Why didn’t you ask who it was?”

“Panic. Somebody had just called my cell phone and threatened my life.” I opened the nightstand drawer. “Then there’s this.”

“Give me your cell phone. We’ll trace the call. I’ll get the contents of that drawer to forensics, too.”