Rachel Minsky slid a three-page form across the table to me. We were in a booth at a working-class restaurant on Watervliet that served cabbage rolls, which Rachel said were Hungarian. The dark beer we were drinking while we waited wasn’t half bad. Apart from a waitress, we were the only women, but no one in the noonday crowd so much as ogled us. It strongly suggested Rachel was known here.
“You mind telling me why you wanted a bid sheet for a construction project? And why couldn’t you pick it up at my office?” she asked.
Rachel looked like a porcelain doll: pointed chin, a cloud of dark hair, pulp magazine bosom. The suit she had on had set her back more than I paid for a month’s rent. A trio of minks chased each other around her neck. She could have fit right in with the guests at the Canterbury, except, perhaps, for the fact that she was a Jew. And ran a construction company. And, somewhere—ever so discreetly—carried a gun.
She was the black ewe in a family that otherwise ran to bankers and lawyers and women who stayed home. Plenty of people claimed she was crooked. I trusted her.
“I need a form that looks semi-official if nobody reads too closely. I’m kind of short on time, and I figured if you’d meet me for lunch it would save some.”
“And?”
“And I thought if I plied you with liquor, I might pry useful information out of you,” I said.
“A man here and there has tried that.” She cocked her head. “Are your intentions pure?”
I grinned.
Rachel’s eyes were dark as an abyss. As dangerous to misjudge, too. Right now they suggested amusement. She took out a tortoiseshell lighter and matching cigarette case.
“What kind of information you need?”
“Didn’t you tell me once your people were Polish?”
“My family, you mean? Way back when. My mother’s side had been here ten, fifteen years before she was born. My father was a toddler when his folks came over.”
“You know much about the politics there?”
“Apart from Hitler taking over? Not really. Near as I can tell, their history’s pretty much been fight, lose, get gobbled up by some country, then repeat the whole thing with another country gobbling them. Why?”
“I need to find out about a man named Szarenski. Whether he’s really a count, for starters.”
She was fitting a cigarette into a long gold holder. Her head snapped up.
“He’s real, all right. War hero. He fought against the Nazis when they rolled in, then joined an underground group. Home Army or some such. The Germans burned his estate, killed a relative – brother, son.”
She shrugged off her display of knowledge.
“My father and brothers talk about things over there at Shabbat dinner. The women start talking kids. I drift in and out.” Lighting the cigarette, she jutted her jaw to the side so the smoke she expelled didn’t reach me. She studied me thoughtfully. “Don’t tell me something you’re working on involves Szarenski.”
“Not directly.”
I paused while the waitress served our cabbage rolls. When we were alone again, I outlined the situation, omitting the fact I had my eye on the count as a suspect.
“The mere fact he would come here instead of a bigger city seems... odd.” Rachel rocked the paw of a dead mink back and forth in her fingers. “It would be kind of fun knowing something my brothers don’t. Let me see what I can find out.”
* * *
Before putting Rachel’s nifty form to work, I wanted to pursue another idea. Suppose, I thought, that no jewelry ever appeared to be missing from the hotel safe because the thief replaced the stolen item with a fake? With a copy, or even a random piece like the rhinestone bracelet Nick Perry had purchased that morning?
I wasn’t sure how such a scheme would work, especially if the replacement didn’t match what was taken. Given that I didn’t have many other ideas at the moment, if I walked around this one and poked at it, it might start to take shape.
My first walk-around was that Lagarde, known for his excellent copies, had been mixed up in it. Maybe even unwittingly. Maybe something made him suspicious. At any rate, he had to be gotten out of the way.
With Lagarde dead, whoever was getting into the safe would need to find someone else to make copies. Hunting another reputable jeweler meant the risk of attracting attention. Which was why I pulled the DeSoto into a parking place down the street from a theatrical supply place.
“Hey, good-looking. Long time no see.” The owner of the place straightened from the carton of greasepaint he was bending over and shot me a grin.
“How’s tricks, Skip?”
“I could teach you a few if you’re free for dinner.”
“Your wife might object. Anyway, how do you know I couldn’t teach you a few?”
He had a laugh that filled a room and a barrel chest to go with it. Today he sported red suspenders.
“Ah, Maggie. You break my heart every time you come through the door. Are you here to change how you look, or hunting gossip?”
I ducked a bevy of feather boas that hung from the ceiling.
“I’m here to avail myself of your wisdom.”
On the other side of the velvet curtain behind him there was a snort. His wife, sewing sequins on a special order and chuckling, probably. I’d met them when a wealthy woman hired me to check the background of a young actor who was showing interest in her granddaughter.
“When someone around here needs a fancy necklace that looks like diamonds and such for a play or a girlie show, where can they buy that? Or get it made?”
Skip cocked his head and leaned on the display case in front of him. He eyed me shrewdly.
“Now that is a popular question today.”
“Who else has been asking?”
“Not one of our regulars. Well-dressed gent. Came in right before noon.
“He claimed he was manager of a new show arriving in town. Told me one of their trunks had gone missing between here and Indianapolis, and he wanted to make sure they had the bijoux needed for a ballroom scene.”
“He happened to mention which theater?”
“Nope.”
“Name of the show?”
“Nope?”
“Give you a card or maybe an address where you could reach him?”
“No on both.”
“Where did you send him?”
The shop owner stared at the case where his elbows rested. It held smoke pots, flash powders, spirit gum and a jumble of other things, all of it piled so densely only he, and maybe his wife, knew where to find things. When he lifted his head, concern had pressed lines in his face.
“I’ll tell you, but the fellow I sent him to... I’ve only met him a time or two. He strikes me as shifty. Claims he doesn’t make copies, just glues on chunks of colored glass he buys by the box like we do feathers and gloves and I don’t know what all. I’ve never heard anything, except a house manager here and there grumbling he played fast and loose with his billing. But—”
“Thanks for warning me, Skip. I’ll watch my step.”
“His name’s Rose. Delbert Rose.”
He wrote down an address, which I tucked in my pocket.
“The man who came in asking before me, what did he look like?”
“Dark hair, mustache, medium build. Might have been downright handsome except for a couple of brown moles right above the bridge of his nose.” He indicated one side.
It wasn’t Perry. I thought a minute.
“Could the moles have been fake?”
Skip blinked, then nodded slow appreciation.
“Yeah. You’d think I’d pick up on something like that. The mustache, too. It wasn’t the walrus type, but it wasn’t a skimpy little Hitler type, either. Putty... spirit gum...”
As plain as the nose on your face, I thought. Or the moles, which would be the only thing people would remember about a man who wanted to change how he looked.