When neither Mark nor Dennis had called by four thirty Marti reached for the phone. She called Dennis first. She didn’t have his home or cell phone number and he was a salaried county employee. When he picked up, she was surprised that he hadn’t already left for the weekend.
“Oh, hi,” he said. “Look, I usually leave at four on Friday, but I think I’m on to something. Can you stick around a while longer?”
Marti smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t be going home anytime soon.”
When Mark answered, he said, “I’m right in the middle of something, Marti. I’ll call you as soon as I can,” and clicked off.
Marti settled back to wait for the pizza to be delivered and the phone to ring. While she was waiting, she went through Holmberg’s printouts again. She got a phone book and wrote the phone number for every veteran’s name she could match with those on his list. There weren’t many, and just because the name matched didn’t mean it was the same person or even a member of his family. It was too late to check with any veterans’ organization, so she picked up the phone. One hour and one pizza later, she and Vik had made it through the names with phone numbers and talked with fourteen vets. Two were women, four were sailors, and one was a pilot; the rest were Army, what Vik referred to as “grunts.” Everyone she spoke to was reluctant to talk about the war. None of them knew what she was talking about when she asked about monument officers.
She was going to have to begin contacting veterans’ organizations first thing Monday morning. She wanted to believe she wouldn’t need to by then, but the way things were going, or not going, that seemed unlikely. She checked her e-mail. There was nothing from Lieutenant Nicholson. Vik was submitting daily reports for both of them, but Marti wondered if her lack of communication meant that she was still deciding how to retaliate.
“Vik, did you ever ask Stephen about why the old brick and the new brick matched?”
He gave her a blank look.
“The building where we found the skeletal remains,” she reminded him. “The bricked-up windows.”
“Oh, that. I didn’t say anything because he didn’t know. The only things he could come up with was that it could have been salvaged from another building that went up at about the same time and was being torn down. Or, and he thought this was a very remote possibility, the same brick was made or kept in stock for an extended period of time because of the availability of the materials used, or its popularity. But I cannot think of one other building on or near Geneva Street made with that brick.”
When Mark returned her call, he said, “Savannah Payne-Jones was quite a gambler, loved card games, preferably blackjack and poker. She had two outstanding gambling debts when she died. She was into a Nevada casino for forty grand and a private dealer for another thirty-five grand. These guys are being very cooperative and we’re still talking with them. What we’re trying to find out now is how long she’d been at it, how often she got into the hole, how she got out, how reliable she was about paying her debts. This is small change to the casino, but big bucks to the dealer.”
“Would he have killed her because of it?” Marti asked. “Would he take her jewelry to recoup some of his losses?”
“That’s what we’re looking at. We’re holding him. At worst the casino probably would have barred her from playing. This dealer is new to the game. If he’s got a lot of debt, and she was the best- known debtor, he’s a possibility.”
“How likely is that?”
“This guy is young and just starting out. Gambling is like any other business. People have misconceptions, watch too much TV They make mistakes when they don’t have the experience to handle something.”
“You will let me know if you’ve got anything else?” Marti pressed.
“As soon as I can.”
That was an ambiguous answer, but honest, which was more than she had expected.
Marti shared Mark’s side of the conversation with Vik. He was shaking his head before she finished.
“Too much of a long shot,” he concluded. “Even if he gives up this new dealer, I wouldn’t buy into it without a confession and some corroborating evidence.”
“Why would she voluntarily meet this guy, or his messenger?” Marti agreed. “And why here? It’s not even getting local coverage, let alone national coverage. That’s no way to build a reputation for being a bad guy.”
“Unless she was his best-known customer,” Vik said. “Which isn’t saying much,”
“Whoever killed her has to have the jewelry,” Marti said. “The question is, was the jewelry the mark, or was she? If it was the jewelry, if it was to pay off a gambling debt, the killer had to be smart enough to know it was worth something. Otherwise the jewelry was taken because it had some intrinsic value to whoever killed her. The question then becomes, who knew Jones would be here, and who did Jones know well enough to get into a car with without being under duress? If on the other hand, Jones was the mark and the jewelry incidental, then why was I pushed down the stairs at the library?”
“We’re stretching that one, too, Marti. If it was deliberate, someone had to know you were going to Jeweler’s Row and then follow you to the library.”
“Following me wouldn’t have been that difficult. I enjoyed that walk through the city. Stopped and got a Chicago-style hot- dog. Relaxed.” As far-fetched as it seemed, she still wasn’t ready to concede that she was a random mark. “The jewelry,” she repeated. “That is the only thing that sets Jones apart.” Like it or not, getting pushed down those stairs and having her purse rifled convinced her of that. “A lot of people gamble. And a lot of people go into debt doing it. Some of them kill to get the money to pay, but killing someone over thirty-five or forty thousand dollars doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Unless it was the inexperienced dealer. Vik ran his fingers through his hair. “But what is it about the damned jewelry that makes it that important?”
“Hell if I know,” Marti admitted. “The larger question is, how did an African-American woman come into possession of a Von Weiss brooch? How did Jones?”
“Which brings us back to why would someone commission a set of jewelry that was zirconia set in gold?” Vik ran his fingers through his hair again. “Every potential lead brings a dozen more questions.”
Marti looked at Holmberg’s printouts again, checked the notes she made while she was talking with the jeweler and made a list:
Zirconium—Romania Garnet—Russia Peridot—West Germany
She showed the list to Vik. “Von Weiss visited all three countries.”
“So how would jewelry made in three different countries all end up in Illinois?”
Marti had no answer. She got a cup of coffee that had been made this morning and kept hot. Then she began looking for the blank spaces, the questions she hadn’t thought to ask yet. Once again, her mind settled on a black woman with many braids and an emerald brooch. If that woman was somehow involved in Jones’s death, did that mean she came here from someplace else and gained Jones’s trust because she was black, was she someone Jones knew? Did she live in Chicago, or here in Lincoln Prairie?
Marti found Tansy Lark’s business card and called the cell phone number scrawled on the back. After she identified herself, she asked, “Was there any publicity given to local media here about the shoot?”
“Of course not. Word gets out, but if we officially release information we’d have so many gapers we’d need extra security personnel. It would be a royal nightmare. We wait until the film comes out to do that. We want them to go to the theaters, not the film site.”
“We have an African-American newspaper in Chicago. Did any of their reporters make any inquiries about Jones?”
“Officer, let’s get real. Nobody, black or white, has ever called and asked about Jones anywhere or at any time that I was working with her. We are not talking Oscar-winning performances here. We are not talking Oscar-nominated films. Savannah Payne- Jones doesn’t . . . didn’t . . . have a name in this business. She was the woman behind the wheel of a car, the woman who walked through the revolving door, or sat at a table in a restaurant, cleaned up, or served food. That’s it.”
Marti thanked her. Then she called the Chicago newspaper anyway. The man she spoke with did check their recent archives, but it was too vague a search. Then she thought of Elroy Reed, editor of The People’s Voice. It was a free, local, multiethnic newspaper, published monthly. Momma always got a copy because it carried a lot of news about the African-American community that wasn’t printed in the dailies. She got Elroy’s answering machine and left a message.
“Jones did get the jewelry from her mother, who got it from Jones’s grandmother. That could have happened during or not long after the war. I’m certain there were no black monument officers, but anyone—a cook, steward, valet, whatever—might have been able to get their hands on it.”
“That only solves the question about Jones,” Vik said. “What about the other two women?”
Marti turned on her computer and phoned home. Theo and Mike had been working on their family trees for almost a year. She explained that she needed to know how to find someone’s parents. Theo suggested the Social Security Death Index database and Mike added that once she knew when and where they died she could look at local newspapers for the obituary. Marti could not believe they were so matter-of-fact about it. She couldn’t believe they had actually visited those sites, but they must have.
Tears came to her eyes and she put her head in her hands. What if they had to tell the boys that Ben had prostate cancer? Should they? Maybe they should tell them slowly. Daddy needs an operation, then wait and see what the prognosis was before they took it any further. Yes, she decided. She would talk it over with Ben tonight. His first wife and Johnny had both died suddenly and unexpectedly. There would be time to help the children to adjust to whatever was going to happen. And as Momma had reminded her several times, black men also survived prostate cancer, many people survived cancer if it was detected early enough.
When Dennis called back, Marti realized she had forgotten he had said he was going to.
“Sorry this took me so long,” he said. She looked at her watch, six forty-five.
“The secretaries were gone and I had to go through their files myself. And trust me, I take my life in my hands when I do that. If one file is out of order I am in deep trouble.”
“I appreciate your doing this. You must be long overdue at home.”
“No problem. You got my curiosity up, I would have gone nuts this weekend if I didn’t at least try to find something out.”
“Did you?”
“Well, what I’ve got is the name of the contractor who did the brickwork and put in the false ceiling.”
Marti grabbed a pencil.
“Warren Newsome Senior.”
“Newsome,” Marti repeated. “I’ve seen that name around town on construction projects.”
“He sold the company years ago, not long after his oldest son died in the war. But the business was established in 1885, so they kept the name.”
“Thanks,” Marti said. “I really appreciate this and I owe you big-time. If there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”
She knew that those could be dangerous words for a cop to say, but the stories she had heard today, the things she had learned, had put her in a peculiar mood. Not sad exactly, more like melancholy. She read the names of the Web sites again, then told Vik about Newsome.
“It’s a little after seven. Do you want to see him tonight?”
“This has been one hell of a long day, Marti. What I really want to do is go home to Mildred and Maxie, have a little real food, put my feet up, and watch an old movie.”
“I’m with you,” Marti agreed.
“This Newsome family. I think there’s just some old guy left. Unless he dies in his sleep tonight, he’s not going anywhere.”
“With our luck ...” Marti began.
“With our luck we’ll get to hear another sob story tomorrow. I’ve heard enough for one day. Turn off the computer. Let’s go.” She turned it off, reached for her jacket, and thought of a spending a few hours with the kids and the rest of the night with Ben.