21.

She gave us permission to search the house. Not many people are as good at tossing a room or a house as I am, but Sorrentino was one of them. We found a lot of stuff that didn’t belong in the house of a wealthy, happily married business tycoon—love letters from a pair of girlfriends hidden in one of his business folders in a desk drawer, a warning from the electric company that they’d be cutting off his service if he didn’t bring his bill up to date, dunning letters from half a dozen stores and creditors, all of them relatively recent. I turned the love letters over to his wife to thank her for her help and to give her a little extra ammunition against him.

But when we’d finished two hours later there were two things that we hadn’t found—the diamonds and anything that might conceivably have been the murder weapon. Mrs. Delahunt was almost as disappointed as we were and told us we had carte blanche to come back, alone or with the cops, whenever we wanted. I asked where her husband was, but all she could answer was: “In one of his offices that hasn’t been shut down yet, or with one of his whores who hasn’t been shut down yet. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

I dropped Sorrentino by his car, and he followed me to a bar in Clifton, the university area, about four miles away. We both parked on the street, tried not to feel too ancient as we made our way past all the late teens and early twenty-somethings standing at the long bar, and took a table as far from the noise as we could get.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked as we waited for the bearded waiter to approach us.

“We’ve probably got enough for Simmons to arrest him, especially with his wife on our side,” I said. “But with no gun and no diamonds . . .” I just shook my head. “He’d be lawyered up and out the next morning. Always assuming he has enough money to hire a lawyer.”

“I don’t give a shit about that,” said Sorrentino. “I’m not a cop, and neither are you. What about the diamonds?”

I shrugged. “He sure as hell doesn’t have them in the house. If he’s hiding them, we have to figure out where. If he sold them—and he has to have sold at least some of them, since none of his creditors have taken him to court yet—we have to figure out who he sold them to.”

“Okay,” he said. “Our next step is easy enough. I get him alone and beat the shit out of him until he talks.”

I shook my head. “This isn’t Chicago, Val,” I said. “The cops won’t look the other way. You beat the information out of him, at worst you’ll be up for battery, at best the cops will claim you were trying to steal the diamonds and you’ll lose all claim to a finder’s fee.”

He frowned. “Then what do you suggest?”

“We keep trying to find the diamonds,” I said. “They’re what we’re after. If we don’t have any contact with Delahunt, no one can claim bribery, extortion, intimidation, or anything else.”

“Your cops would actually do that?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Like I say, this isn’t Chicago.”

He shook his head in wonderment. “Strange city.”

“We’ll look for the gun, too,” I added.

“Why do we care?” replied Sorrentino. “All we want is the goddamned diamonds.”

“We find the diamonds and you’re in Chicago a few hours later. But I’ll be staying in Cincinnati with a very bitter man who’s already killed someone with that gun and who will be convinced that I’m the only reason he couldn’t stop his life from going down the tubes.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

I smiled. “Why should you? You’re going to be safe and sound three hundred miles away.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So what about the diamonds?”

“I think if he’d left them with any of the Cincinnati fences I’d know by now, and while I haven’t spoken to Simmons I’m sure he has a man on the job too,” I said. “So I have a feeling we’re going to need your organization’s connections to find them. We’ll keep looking here, of course, and I think it might make sense for us to take turns keeping an eye on Delahunt, but I really don’t know what else we can do.”

“You think his wife knows anything?”

I shook my head. “She’s so mad at him, she’d be first in line to tell us anything that would put him away for life.”

“Yeah. I suppose so,” he agreed. “Well, my people aren’t without their resources. I can find out within, say, forty-eight hours how much he’s got in the bank. I can probably even find out if he’s visited a safety deposit box. He must have one; there was no safe in the house. And of course we can check his business accounts too.”

And suddenly, as he was speaking, I began to get an idea. Maybe it would amount to nothing, but we were running out of approaches. And if I was right, I’d have to do it alone.

We talked a little more, wound up comparing the Big Red Machine to the 1959 White Sox, and Walter Payton’s Bears to Boomer Esiason’s Bengals, and finally we finished our beers and walked out to where we’d left the cars.

“So where do we meet for lunch?” he asked.

I knew it would have to be within a few minutes of the river, so I thought for a moment and answered, “Joe’s Diner, over on Sycamore Street.”

He laughed. “Come on, Eli. Where are we really meeting?”

“I just told you: Joe’s Diner. You’ve got a Global Whatever. You’ll find it.”

“There’s actually a place called Joe’s Diner?”

“It’s a landmark,” I told him.

He snorted. “Is there anything in this town that isn’t a landmark?”

“Not much,” I answered.

“Okay. Noon?”

“Make it one o’clock,” I said. “I’m running a little short on sleep, and I don’t want you waiting alone at a table for half an hour. Hell, you might get so bored you decide to run off with Mrs. Delahunt.”

He grimaced. “Okay, one o’clock.”

He climbed into his car, and a moment later I did the same. I’d bought myself maybe three and a half hours before lunch tomorrow. I hoped it was enough time.