Eight Million Ways to Die (38 page)

"Yes."

"It's the approximate size of the stone I'm talking about. I'm a detective, I'm trying to get some idea of the value of a ring that has disappeared since I saw it, I--"

"Oh," he said, and sighed. "For a moment I thought--"

"I know what you thought."

He took the loupe from his eye, set it on the desk in front of him.

"When you sit here," he said, "you are at the absolute mercy of the public. You wouldn't believe the people who come here, the things they show me, the questions they ask."

"I can imagine."

"No, you can't." He picked up the bit of green glass and shook his head at it. "I still can't tell you the value. Size is only one of several considerations. There's also color, there's clarity, there's brilliance. Do you even know that the stone is an emerald? Did you test it for hardness?"

"No."

"So it could even be colored glass. Like the, uh, treasure you've given me here."

"For all I know it is glass. But I want to know what it could be worth if it did happen to be an emerald."

"I think I see what you mean." He frowned at the piece of glass.

"You have to understand that my every inclination is to avoid naming any sort of a figure. You see, even assuming the stone is a genuine emerald, its range in value could be considerable. It could be extremely valuable or very nearly worthless. It could be seriously flawed, for example. Or it could simply be a very low-grade stone. There are mail order firms that actually offer emeralds by the carat for some ridiculous sum, forty or fifty dollars the carat, and what they're selling is no bargain, either. Yet they are genuine emeralds, however worthless they may be as gemstones."

"I see."

"Even a gem-quality emerald could vary enormously in value. You could buy a stone this size--" he weighed the chunk of glass in his hand

"-- for a couple thousand dollars. And that would be a good stone, not industrial-grade corundum from western North Carolina. On the other hand, a stone of the highest quality, the best color, perfect brilliance, unflawed, not even Peruvian but the very best Colombian emerald, might bring forty or fifty or sixty thousand dollars. And even that's approximate and imprecise."

He had more to say but I wasn't paying attention. He hadn't really told me anything, hadn't added a fresh piece to the puzzle, but he'd given the box a good shake. Now I could see where everything went.

I took the cube of green glass with me when I left.

Around ten-thirty that night I walked in and out of Poogan's Pub on West Seventy-second Street. A light rain had begun falling an hour or so earlier. Most of the people on the street were carrying umbrellas.

I wasn't, but I had a hat, and I paused on the sidewalk to straighten it and adjust its brim.

Across the street I saw a Mercury sedan with its motor riding.

I turned to my left and walked to the Top Knot. I spotted Danny Boy at a table in back but went to the bar anyway and asked for him. I must have spoken loudly because people looked at me. The bartender motioned toward the rear and I went back there and joined him.

He already had company. He was sharing his table with a slender fox-faced girl whose hair was as white as his own, but in her case nature couldn't take the credit. Her eyebrows were severely plucked and her forehead had a shine to it. Danny Boy introduced her as Bryna. "Rhymes with angina," he said, "among other things." She smiled, showing sharp little canine teeth.

I pulled a chair out and sat down heavily. I said, "Danny Boy, you can pass the word. I know all about Kim Dakkinen's boyfriend. I know who killed her and I know why she was killed."

"Matt, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I said. "You know why I had so much trouble getting a line on Kim's boyfriend? Because he wasn't an action guy, that's why.

Didn't go to clubs, didn't gamble, didn't hang out. Wasn't connected."

"You been drinking, Matt?"

"What are you, the Spanish Inquisition? What do you care if I've been drinking or not?"

"I just wondered. You're talking loud, that's all."

"Well, I'm trying to tell you about Kim," I said. "About her boyfriend. See, he was in the jewelry business. He didn't get rich, he didn't starve. He made a living."

"Bryna," he said, "suppose you powder your nose for a few minutes."

"Oh, let her stay," I told him. "Her nose doesn't look shiny to me."

"Matt--"

"What I'm telling you's no secret, Danny Boy."

"Suit yourself."

"This jeweler," I went on. "The way it looks, he started seeing Kim as a john. But something happened.

One way or another, he fell for her."

"These things happen."

"They do indeed. Anyway, he fell in love. Meanwhile, some people got in touch with him. They had some precious stones that never went through Customs and that they had no bill of sale for. Emeralds.

Colombian emeralds. Real quality stuff."

"Matt, would you please tell me why in the hell you're telling me all this?"

"It makes an interesting story."

"You're not just telling me, you're telling the whole room. Do you know what you're doing?"

I looked at him.

"Okay," he said, after a moment. "Bryna, pay attention, darling.

The crazy man wants to talk about emeralds."

"Kim's boyfriend was going to be the middleman, handling the sale of the emeralds for the men who'd brought them into the country. He did this sort of thing before, made a few dollars for himself. But now he was in love with an expensive lady and he had a reason to want some real money. So he tried a cross."

"How?"

"I don't know. Maybe he switched some stones. Maybe he held out. Maybe he decided to grab the whole bundle and run with it. He must have told Kim something because on the strength of it she told Chance she wanted out. She wasn't going to be turning tricks anymore.

If I were going to guess, I'd say he did a switch and went out of the country to unload the good stuff. Kim got herself free of Chance while he was gone, and when he got back it was going to be Happily Ever After time. But he never came back."

"If he never came back, who killed her?"

"The people he crossed. They decoyed her to that room at the Galaxy Downtowner. She probably thought she was going to be meeting him there. She wasn't hooking anymore, she wouldn't have gone to a hotel room to meet a john. In fact she'd never been much on hotel tricks.

But suppose she gets a call from somebody who says he's a friend and the boyfriend's afraid to come to her place because he thinks he's being followed, so would she please meet him at the hotel?"

"And she went."

"Sure she went. She got all dressed up, she wore the presents he gave her, the mink jacket and the emerald ring. The jacket wasn't worth a fortune because the guy wasn't rich, he didn't have money to burn, but he could give her a terrific emerald because the emeralds didn't cost him anything. He was in the business, he could take one of those smuggled stones and have it set in a ring for her."

"So she went over and got killed."

"Right."

Danny Boy drank some vodka. "Why? You figure they killed her to get the ring back?"

"No. They killed her to kill her."

"Why?"

"Because they were Colombians," I said, "and that's how they do it. When they have a reason to hit somebody they go for the whole family."

"Jesus."

"Maybe they figure it's a deterrent," I said. "I could see where it might be. The cases make the papers pretty regularly, especially in Miami. A whole family gets waxed because somebody burned somebody else in a coke deal. Colombia's a rich little country. They've got the best coffee, the best marijuana, the best cocaine."

"And the best emeralds?"

"That's right. Kim's jeweler wasn't a married guy. I figured he was, that's why he was so hard to get a line on, but he never married. Maybe he never fell in love until he fell in love with Kim, and maybe that's why he was ready to kick his life over. Anyway, he was a bachelor. No wife, no kids, no living parents.

You want to rub out his family, what do you do? You kill his girlfriend."

Bryna's face was as white as her hair now. She didn't like stories where they killed the girlfriend.

"The killing was pretty professional," I went on, "in that the killer was careful about evidence. He covered his tracks pretty well. But something made him do a butcher job instead of a couple of quick bullets from a silenced handgun. Maybe he had a thing about prostitutes, or maybe it was women in general. One way or another, he went and did a number on Kim.

"Then he cleaned up, packed the dirty towels along with the machete, and got out of there. He left the fur jacket and he left the money in the purse but he took her ring."

"Because it was worth so much money?"

"Possibly. There's no hard evidence on the ring, and for all I know it was cut glass and she bought it for herself. But it might have been an emerald, and even if it wasn't the killer might have thought it was. It's one thing to leave a few hundred dollars on a dead body to show you don't rob the dead. It's something else to leave an emerald that might be worth fifty thousand dollars, especially if it's your emerald in the first place."

"I follow you."

"The room clerk at the Galaxy Downtowner was a Colombian, a young kid named Octavio Calderon.

Maybe that was a coincidence. There are a lot of Colombians in town these days. Maybe the killer picked the Galaxy because he knew somebody who worked there. It doesn't matter. Calderon probably recognized the killer, or at least knew enough about him to keep his mouth shut. When a cop came back to have another talk with him, Calderon disappeared. Either the killer's friends told him to disappear or Calderon decided he'd be safer somewhere else. Back home in Cartagena, say, or another rooming house in another part of Queens."

Or maybe he got killed, I thought. That was possible, too. But I didn't think so. When these people killed, they liked to leave the corpses in plain sight.

"There was another whore that got killed."

"Sunny Hendryx," I said. "That was a suicide. Maybe Kim's death triggered that, so maybe the man who killed Kim has some moral responsibility for Sunny's death. But she killed herself."

"I'm talking about the street hustler. The TV."

"Cookie Blue."

"That's the one. Why did she get killed? To throw you off the track? Except you weren't on the track to begin with."

"No."

"Then why? You think the first killing turned the killer nuts?

Triggered something in him that made him want to do it again?"

"I think that's part of it," I said. "Nobody would do a second butcher job like that unless he enjoyed the first one. I don't know if he had sex with either of his victims, but the kick he got out of the killings had to be sexual."

"So he just picked up Cookie for the hell of it?"

Bryna blanched again. It was bad enough hearing about someone who got killed for being the wrong person's girl- friend. It was even worse hearing about a girl getting killed at random.

"No," I said, "Cookie was killed for a specific reason. The killer went looking for her and passed up a batch of other streetwalkers until he found her. Cookie was family."

"Family? Whose family?"

"The boyfriend's."

"He had two sweeties, this jeweler? A call girl and a transvestite hustler?"

"Cookie wasn't his sweetie. Cookie was his brother."

"Cookie--"

"Cookie Blue started life as Mark Blaustein. Mark had an older brother named Adrian who went into the jewelry business. Adrian Blaustein had a girlfriend named Kim and some business associates from Colombia."

"So Cookie and Kim were connected."

"They had to be connected. I'm sure they never met each other. I don't think Mark and Adrian had any contact in recent years. That may explain why it took the killer so long to find Cookie. But I knew there had to be some kind of link. I told someone earlier that they were sisters under the skin. That wasn't far off. They were almost sisters-in-law."

He thought about this, then told Bryna to give us a few moments alone. This time I didn't interfere. She left the table and Danny Boy motioned to the waitress. He ordered vodka for himself and asked me what I wanted.

"Nothing right now," I said.

When she brought back the vodka he took a careful little sip and set the glass down. "You've been to

the cops," he said.

"No cops."

"Why not?"

"Just didn't get around to it yet."

"You had to come here instead."

"That's right."

"I can keep my mouth shut, Matt, but Bryna the Vagina wouldn't know how. She thinks unexpressed thoughts build up inside your head and explode your skull, and she's not taking any chances. Anyway, you were talking loud enough for half the room to pick up on what you were saying."

"I know that."

"I figured you did. What do you want?"

"I want the killer to know what I know."

"That shouldn't take long."

"I want you to pass it on, Danny Boy. I'm leaving here, I'm walking back to my neighborhood. I'll probably spend a couple of hours in Armstrong's. Then I'll walk around the corner to my room."

"You're gonna get killed, Matt."

"This fucker only kills girls," I said.

"Cookie was only half a girl. Maybe he's working his way up to men."

"Maybe."

"You want him to make a move on you."

"Looks that way, doesn't it?"

"Looks to me as though you're crazy, Matt. I tried to head you off the minute you came over here. Tried to cool you down some."