Montaro Caine (17 page)

Now Cordiss also knew information that Dr. Mozelle and Anna had not yet learned—that Whitney had gotten married, that she was pregnant, that her husband’s name was Franklyn Walker, and that he had been born at the county hospital in Augusta in April 1984 with a midwife in attendance. With this information, Cordiss spent hours online scouring birth records, genealogical websites, and other Web resources to learn all she could about Whitney’s husband Franklyn and the circumstances surrounding his birth. If Dr. Mozelle and Anna’s theories proved true, with a little luck, those theories could lead to Cordiss Krinkle’s salvation. Whitney had described her relationship with Franklyn as if it had been somehow fated—she had used the words “otherworldly force” to describe their meeting. Perhaps Whitney was some kind of messianic figure, Cordiss wondered. And yet, she had never noticed anything remarkable about the pleasant young woman who came into the office every year for her checkup.

Over the following week and a half, Cordiss made a series of phone calls and sent a flurry of e-mails—to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Augusta, Georgia, to the county hospital, to each of the local elementary schools, and finally to the aged minister of an A.M.E. Church in the town’s black section, which was now known as the Laney-Walker Historic District. The minister Cordiss spoke with mentioned a midwife named Carrie Pittman. “If you’re looking for someone who was born at the county hospital round about that time, chances are good Ms. Pittman was there or knew about it,” said the minister. “Of course, she retired years ago and moved to Kansas City, but I’ll bet she’s still alive.”

Carrie Pittman was surprised when a caller with a pleasant voice introduced herself as the curator of the Augusta Richmond County Historical Society, which, the caller claimed, was preparing an exhibit on the history of midwifery in Georgia. The caller went on to make polite inquiries about the birth of a certain baby the midwife may have delivered early in her career.

“We here at the Historical Society understand that you were the midwife in attendance on April 18, 1984, when Franklyn Walker was born,” Cordiss Krinkle said.

“Yes … I suppose so … Franklyn Walker … Yes …” The midwife chuckled at her next thought. “ ’Course you know they run into the hundreds, all the babies I pulled into this life,” she said.

“Well,” Cordiss continued, “our information also tells us that something unusual and dramatic occurred during that particular birth. You brought Franklyn Walker into life with something special in the palm of his hand.”

The name itself had been one Pittman had never forgotten, even as her memory had begun to fade. But now she was stunned into silence. The old midwife’s thoughts raced backward, but only fragmentary flashes from the past danced across her mind. She could not recall having mentioned this incident to anyone, not even to her sister.
Dear God
, she thought,
did I tell someone? How could I have told someone and not remember?

“Who told y’all about that?” Carrie Pittman asked, haltingly.

“It was some time ago,” Cordiss continued in a soothing tone. “The information reached someone connected to our museum, but no one acted upon it. Now that that someone is no longer with us, it was recently brought to my attention. Frankly, I thought the discovery you made that morning was much more than just a wonderful human-interest story. I think the object should be a part of our exhibit. Something that might, in time, prove useful for history and science. It should be properly preserved.”

From the silence at the other end of the line, Cordiss sensed Pittman’s anxiousness. She continued to reassure the woman before she pushed her luck.

“Do you still have the coin?” she asked.

The old woman hesitated before answering. “Yes, yes, I think I do have it somewhere.”

Cordiss gulped, but quickly pressed on. “We would be willing to purchase it from you for a reasonable sum.”

“You want to buy it?”

“Yes, if you agree.” The thought had never occurred to her that she would find the coin so quickly, and she hadn’t considered what sum to offer. “Ten thousand dollars,” Cordiss stated.

There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” the elderly woman finally said. “I’ll have to think about it and talk about it with my sister. I don’t know right now.”

The change in the old woman’s voice told Cordiss she should let things rest for a while. “All right, you think about it, and I’ll call you again in a couple of weeks.”

Cordiss was ecstatic when she hung up the phone. The coin existed, and aside from the old woman, she was the only one who knew. Mozelle didn’t know. Anna Hilburn didn’t know. It appeared that Franklyn Walker didn’t even know. Her plan might just work.

While she waited patiently for her next conversation with Pittman, Cordiss force-fed herself a diet of information about rare art collectors. She was coached by her streetwise boyfriend of five years, Victor Lambert, who was a product of Hell’s Kitchen, where even now, survival depended, more often than not, on highly honed instincts and the ability, so said Victor, to “piss ice water.”

With Victor’s help, Cordiss selected as their first choice a man named Roland Gabler. Unlike some of the other top collectors, Gabler had not been born into wealth. A native of Needles, Nebraska, he had worked at the Brixton Hardware Store throughout his teenage years. He had charmed and manipulated store owner Ed Brixton to such an extent that the man had remembered Gabler in his will, which had provided Gabler with the money to put himself through Columbia University. Cordiss had recognized something of Victor’s and her own stories and backgrounds in Gabler’s biography and thought he might be a man with whom they could do business.

When she finally succeeded in getting Gabler on the phone, she calmly let drop the information that she had access to an item so rare
that it would, unquestionably, be the number one prize in the entire world for the collector lucky enough to possess it.

Of course, Roland Gabler had heard such talk before, hundreds of times, in fact; but on the off chance that one in a thousand such calls might yield something of substance, he usually had an assistant check them out. In the past thirty years, only once or twice had there been anything worth pursuing. This time, Gabler’s assistant came back with a simple message inviting him to a private viewing of what the caller claimed was the most astounding discovery in human history. So Gabler agreed to see Cordiss in person and asked her to send his assistant some photographs and corroborating documents regarding the object she was preparing to sell.

Then Victor Lambert boarded a plane with fifteen thousand dollars in cash that he and Cordiss had borrowed from a loan shark and flew to Kansas City to meet Carrie Pittman, who had told Cordiss that she was willing to do business with the Historical Society.

“M
R
. V
OEKLE WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU
, M
ISS
,” R
OLAND
G
ABLER
’
S
slim, gray-haired butler told Cordiss Krinkle before he withdrew down a side hallway.

Cordiss stood in the entrance hall of Gabler’s Park Avenue apartment. She had never been in the presence of so much wealth. The marble floor under her feet was buffed to a polish so high that it threw back reflections of Gabler’s beautiful antique furnishings—elegant French tables, ornate benches, magnificent tapestries, paintings Cordiss had seen only in books. Cordiss felt awestruck and out of place until she remembered something she’d read in a recent copy of
Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine
. “Things are always as they should be when money has been wisely spent.” At one point in his life, Gabler’s circumstances had been as modest as Cordiss’s own, she reminded herself, and there was no reason to think that she couldn’t get as far as he had gotten.

“Good afternoon, Miss Krinkle.”

Cordiss stopped admiring the artwork and turned to see a broad-faced, well-dressed man moving aggressively toward her. “I’m Jerome Voekle, an associate of Mr. Gabler’s.” They shook hands. “Would you please follow me?”

As Cordiss followed Voekle through the formal, reserved beauty
of the sprawling apartment, she felt ready; she had done her homework. She knew that in the highly competitive world of rare-art collecting, Roland Gabler was a star, a Grand Marshal in the inner circle referred to as The Ten. He was a longtime survivor of this game in which the coolest head, the steadiest hand, and the strongest nerves nearly always prevailed. And yet he had begun his professional life working in a hardware store.

But Gabler’s presence was so strong that it seemed to vacuum up Cordiss’s attention the moment she laid eyes on him. Jerome Voekle stepped to one side of the door as they entered. “Miss Krinkle, sir,” he told his employer flatly, cueing Cordiss across the room toward Gabler, who stood on the far side of his study, between the fireplace and an oblong seventeenth-century oak table. He was taller and bulkier than she had imagined he would be, with the broad, high chest of a weightlifter. His thick gray hair was conservatively trimmed, and his piercing green eyes were set deep in a lined but still handsome face.

Cordiss was fully aware that Gabler’s green eyes had already locked on to her and were scanning her attire, her stride, her posture, and, above all, her face as if he were examining a rare object that he wasn’t yet sure he would purchase. She assumed he was a good reader of faces. And she was not unmindful of the cold eyes of Jerome Voekle on her back. In her brain, she heard Victor’s voice coaching her:
Stay within yourself, don’t move too fast. Show your strength. And always hang on to your cool. Make him think you piss ice water
.

“Miss Krinkle?”

“Mr. Gabler.”

They pumped hands. “Welcome,” he said, motioning for her to be seated.

“Thank you.” She sat herself at the desk directly across from him.

In her six years of working at the Mozelle Women’s Health Center, Cordiss had learned to pinpoint apprehension, fear, joy, relief, anxiety, or exhilaration in the eyes of the patients who passed her on their way into and out of Dr. Mozelle’s office. But Roland Gabler’s eyes told her nothing at all.

Hold his gaze no matter what
, Victor’s voice coached her.

Gabler drew a chair close to the desk and sat, crossing his legs
while his eyes continued to bore into her. She stared back as if this were a contest, then decided that she should let him win the first round. “What a beautiful apartment,” she offered.

“I’m glad you like it,” Gabler responded, then fell back into silence. He seemed to be waiting for her to explain why she was there.

“You’ve seen the photographs of the object?” Cordiss asked.

“Yes, I have,” responded Gabler.

“And the documents as well?”

“Yes. So, let’s get right to it. Questions will come later.”

Jerome Voekle laid before Gabler the photographs and papers Cordiss had sent him earlier. Voekle also placed on the table instruments of the trade for examining small items—magnifiers, light-scopes, jewelers’ loupes, and the like. Then Voekle maneuvered a chair into a position that allowed him to sit at his employer’s left elbow. Both men’s eyes fixed on Cordiss as she withdrew from her shoulder bag a clear plastic pill container, unscrewed its top, and tilted the container to a careful angle. The coin slid gently onto the tabletop. Cordiss glanced up at the two men, hoping for a reaction; even the slightest flutter could tell her something. But their faces remained unchanged.

Voekle carefully clamped the coin between the arms of a jeweler’s caliper and raised it to Roland Gabler’s eye level, while Gabler wedged a loupe in place around his eye. Taking the caliper from his assistant’s hand, Gabler examined the coin for a long time, referring occasionally to the photographs and documents on the desk. The Xerox copy that Cordiss had made of Montaro Caine’s twenty-six-year-old report to Dr. Chasman commanded more of his attention than did Dr. Mozelle’s notes on the coin’s history. Gradually, Gabler’s concentration deepened until he appeared to be submerged in a private world in which only the collector inside him could dwell.

Cordiss found herself speculating about the workings of such a mind. The chance to examine the coin had to be fascinating—if not historic—to someone consumed with possessing the sufficiently rare, the distinctively artistic, the aesthetically priceless, or, as in the case of the coin, the outrageously unique. “If this guy’s got an ego, and what man doesn’t, we’ll definitely do a deal,” Victor had told her.

Gabler continued to murmur softly to Voekle in abrupt phrases that apparently were not meant for Cordiss’s cocked ear.

Voekle’s notebook flew open as if on reflex, and the assistant began scribbling. Cordiss listened hard, but most of what Gabler seemed to be saying consisted of technical terms or trade references she didn’t understand. She suspected that he was purposely making his comments obtuse to stump her. She let her eyes roam about the study, startled by the variety of objects elegantly mounted in tall, glass showcases—pre-Colombian clay figures, Egyptian artifacts, African carvings, Native American masks, Chinese pottery, Fabergé eggs, ancient daggers, and other unusual items whose shapes, sizes, and colors offered no clues as to what they might be.
God! What a treasure this place is
, she thought.

On a shelf, all by itself, in a showcase near the fireplace, sat a human skull glistening in a white beam of light. Cordiss tried to imagine whether the skull had belonged to a woman or a child. A beheaded queen maybe, or a young prince, or perhaps a Biblical figure from the time of Christ.
One thing for sure
, she thought.
To wind up on a shelf in Roland Gabler’s study, whoever it was had to have lived a spectacular life and likely died an unnatural death
.

As she continued to survey the scene, Cordiss recognized several pieces from descriptions she had read in articles about Gabler. She searched the shelves in vain for the seventeenth-century Hungarian music box for which, according to an article in
American Art Collector
, he was reputed to have paid more than ten million dollars. Nor could she find any sign of the legendary rainbow pearl whose existence was strongly hinted at in the book
The World of the Private Art Collectors
, which she and Victor had recently devoured. Rumor had it that the pearl, the only one of its kind ever found, had been discovered in the South Seas by a native diver who had plunged to a seemingly impossible depth in order to avoid sharks. Although no one knowledgeable in the trade publicly admitted to having seen it, there was general agreement that the pearl did exist in someone’s private collection, and there was very little doubt in anyone’s mind that that someone was Roland Gabler. Of all Cordiss had read about Gabler’s collection, the
pearl intrigued her most. And surely, the coin was more extraordinary than a pearl, she thought.