When I stepped through the front door of the Clarion’s office, an old-fashioned bell tinkled to announce my arrival. The front room was small and divided in two by a counter to separate the public from the newspaper staffers—a holdover, I suspected, from the old days when the locals dropped by regularly to place classifieds, hand over announcements, and complain in person about the editorials or the delivery boys. Now all that was usually done by email, making the counter a pleasant anachronism.
Fred Singer, the owner and editor, popped out of the door behind the counter.
“Meg! Just the person I wanted to see! I want an exclusive interview on what happened last night at Trinity!”
“We can make a deal, then,” I said. “I want to pick your brains about the late Mrs. Van der Lynden.”
“Come into my lair, then,” Fred said.
He led me through the newsroom—a room about the size of my dining room, containing three desks with computers on them, and more paper than I’d have thought it was possible to fit into such a relatively small space. Books, magazines, old newspapers, file folders, and stacks and stacks of loose papers weighted down the desks, filled every corner, and left only narrow paths between them. As we made our way back to Fred’s tiny office, I could hear the rustling of papers as I brushed by them. Fred’s office was much the same. The main path through the paper led to his chair—an old-fashioned wooden banker’s chair on rollers, though the walls of paper around it left no room for rolling—with a branch trail to an old-fashioned wooden straight chair for his guest.
He must have guessed the direction of my thoughts from the expression on my face.
“I’m still waiting for that paperless office everyone keeps talking about,” he said. “Every time I think about getting rid of some of this junk, one of the computers dies, taking several million words with it, and suddenly I’m glad I printed out most of it. Which is why I’m going to take notes about what happened to you last night on this stylishly retro yellow legal pad.”
I knew a cue when I heard one, so I gave him my account of last night—leaving out anything I wasn’t keen on having appear in the Clarion, and again saving the names of the people who’d occupied the opened niches for last.
“So I gather that’s why you’re suddenly so interested in Mrs. Van der Lynden?”
“Because she was one of the people whose niche was pried open last night.”
“By Junius Hagley?”
“Or by whoever killed him. You’d have to ask the chief—that part was still up in the air last I heard. Anyway, last night when I went home, I did a search on Mrs. Van der Lynden’s name, and the first thing that came up was your article on the New Year’s Eve jewel robbery at her house.”
“People love those little bits of local history.” He preened—no doubt at the thought that his article was the first one in my search.
“I figured you could give me the real scoop,” I said. “All the dirt you left out so you didn’t get sued.”
“Ha!” He slapped his knee as if pleased that I’d caught him sanitizing the town history. “Yes, the Van der Lyndens were litigious in their time. Might still be if there are any of them left. I can understand why my predecessor didn’t print quite all the details he knew. For that matter, I’ll have to be pretty careful myself when I write about the Van der Lyndens’ connection to Mr. Hagley’s murder. There’s a difference between knowing what happened and being able to prove it. Frankly, I’m hoping the chief can dig up a few more hard facts I can use. And if you come across anything I can use—”
“I’ll keep the Clarion in mind. So spill.”
He leaned back in his old-fashioned chair, batting absentmindedly at some of the sheets of paper that brushed his head, and folded his hands.
“The Van der Lyndens. They moved here in 1970 or so. Bought the old Wentworth place and doubled its size. Made a big splash in local society.”
“Even though they weren’t from around here?” I asked.
“Folks’ll overlook that if you’ve got enough money. The husband—Archibald Senior—died in the mid-eighties and there was just Mrs. Van der Lynden and Archie Junior, who was drinking and partying his way through college.”
“At Caerphilly?”
“After he got kicked out of UVA and University of Richmond. And quite possibly other schools that we never heard about. The old lady gave Caerphilly a honking big donation, and maybe the college thought with her right in town to keep an eye on him he’d behave a little better.”
“And did he?”
Fred shrugged.
“If he didn’t, they kept it pretty quiet. Made it to his junior year without getting sent home in disgrace. So anyway, the Dames of Caerphilly were having their annual New Year’s shindig. This was back when they were still big.”
I nodded. I could tell from his expression that he hadn’t been any fonder of the Dames than I’d been.
“Mrs. Van der Lynden agreed to host the party. But unbeknownst to the Dames, she also planned to host a jewel robbery.”
“Wait—she was behind the jewel robbery?”
“I can’t prove it, but that’s always been the conventional wisdom. Her money was running out. Not sure if she mismanaged it or if Archie Senior hadn’t been the financial wizard everyone thought he was, but she was up against it. Me, I’d have suggested she find a millionaire to buy the estate, move someplace that was merely huge, and she could probably have hung on to the baubles. But she didn’t think that way. She wanted to have her jewels and her palace and the money, too. So—they never proved this, mind you; a lot of conflicting testimony, but here’s what I think happened—she decided to pull an insurance fraud. Told Archie Junior to arrange a fake robbery. You ask me that was her first mistake—relying on him for anything.”
“Why did she need to involve him?” I asked. “She could hide the jewels, break a window, and call the cops.”
“I think she had a premonition that the insurance company would be suspicious,” Fred said. “So her plan was a little more convoluted. At the beginning of the party, she took a couple of the Dames upstairs with her—to help her pick out which jewels to wear.”
“Thus establishing that the jewels were present and accounted for at the beginning of the party.”
“Exactly. Then just before midnight, when everyone was gathering around the TV set to watch the ball descend in Times Square—”
“You’d think rich people could find some more exciting way to mark the occasion,” I commented.
“Her plan called for a trio of supposed jewel thieves to come running down the main stairway, carrying the jewelry in the pink embroidered satin pillowcases from her bed, and waving guns to make sure no one got the idea to play hero. Instead, five assorted thieves began sniping at each other in the upper hallway and then came downstairs to conduct a pitched gun battle in the main hall. Panic ensued.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “Where did the surplus thieves come from?”
“From what Archie Junior said, he’d made a few overtures to the only actual crook he knew—his drug dealer—and figured out that any professionals he hired would want a big chunk of the loot. So he decided it would be a lot easier to recruit a few of his fraternity brothers to play the role of the jewel thieves. He only managed to get two takers, but he figured that would be enough. Unfortunately, the drug dealer decided to field his own team in the race to snag the jewels, and the real bandits arrived on the scene just as the two college students—whom some of the contemporary accounts referred to as the “gentleman bandits”—had finished loading all the jewel boxes into the pillowcases. The real bandits snatched the pillowcases, the gentleman bandits tried to recover them, and gunfire broke out.”
“Who won?”
“No one, from what I can tell. One of the gentleman bandits and one of the real bandits were killed. The remaining gentleman bandit surrendered at the scene and confessed to what they were up to. He claimed it was just supposed to be a joke on Mrs. Van der Lynden, and it’s possible he actually believed it. The two surviving real bandits were captured a day or two later. They claimed that when they dumped out the contents of the pillowcases and pried open the jewelry boxes, they found nothing but cheap costume jewelry and gravel. They all went to prison—real bandits, gentleman bandit, and Archie. But the jewels never turned up.”
“Not ever?”
“Nope.” Fred shook his head. “Not until you and Horace found the One Ring down in Trinity’s catacombs. As it happens, the chief dropped by this morning to see what we had on the robbery, and we were able to give him copies of the pictures we had in the morgue of some of the more fabulous pieces stolen, including the Van der Lynden Ruby, as the old lady was fond of calling it. Either the ring’s the real thing, or a damn good copy.”
“Did Mrs. Van der Lynden go to prison, too?” I asked.
Fred shook his head.
“Why not?” Although I had a good idea, if Mrs. Van der Lynden could afford the right attorneys. Still. “Conspiracy to defraud the insurance company, accessory before the fact to murder—I’m sure they could think of a few more charges if they tried.”
“They did—but they couldn’t get around the fact that Archie took the fall for his mother. His story wobbled back and forth between claiming he’d only meant to play a prank on her to confessing that he was up to his ears in debt and hoped to sell the jewels to get himself free. But he stoutly denied that his mother had had anything to do with it.”
“Maybe he was telling the truth.”
“Maybe.” Fred steepled his fingers in front of his face. “But no one who ever met him thinks Archie had the brains to think up something like this or the gumption to try it. And the smart money said he was more scared of his mother than of the law. They finally gave up trying to break his story.” He spread his fingers as if setting free some winged creature he’d been clutching.
“So Archie went to prison, and Mrs. Van der Lynden lived happily ever after with the insurance money.”
“She didn’t get the insurance money.”