Glass House (15 page)

That’s what she was working over as she cut
into the park. As she heard the first strains of music.

They were kids. She moved close enough to
see them, drawn over when she didn’t want to be. But she knew they
were kids even before she reached them, with the half-circle of
chairs and parents that surrounded them. She knew it by the
sound.

They were playing a fabulously awful but
alluring and charming, shrieking harpy of a song. The strings of
the instruments squealed. They squawked. The notes were mistimed
here and there. The faces of the children – each no more than
twelve – knotted in concentration. Their heads bobbed and
their lips moved in multiple countings of notes and rests.

Megan wasn’t sure how long she listened.
Long enough to forget Jeremy Waldoch and the deposition, replacing
those images and sounds with the Carolina beach, the lights on the
palmettos, the white furniture, and Benjamin’s promise in the
corner.

He swore they’d learn to tango, and he’d
gone at it like she was serious about the job. He set up lessons as
though Megan actually were going to, actually
could
quit.
And they went. They managed to find time for the first lessons, and
they got better. But they’d never gotten the chance to be good at
it.

Cross my heart, hope to die.

Megan turned away when the song ended. The
applause of proud parents, grandparents, and passersby made her
look up, all memory of South Carolina washing away with the
sound.

She moved toward the street. Past two
college students, flat on the grass, textbooks in front of them.
Past a boy with a baseball glove, the ball in the air above him,
dropping down and being tossed up again in a practice of pop flies.
Past a train engine, landlocked in cement in the park, that
overlooked a picnic table where Megan and Benjamin used to have
lunch on days when their schedules permitted.

Waldoch’s testimony was brightly back in her
head by then. The music was forgotten, the children in another
world. She was thinking only of gifts given to women, and she was
angry about it. Worse yet, she was wounded, and she was
embarrassed. Her pride was cut by the questions and answers and by
watching her client testify to things she never knew.

There wasn’t time for that, though. Dealing
with Kathy Landry’s claims wouldn’t allow anger or embarrassment.
Lora Alexander’s appearance in the case made that all the more
true.

And it was an appearance, not simply a
casual mention. Megan knew that McCallum’s questions about
Alexander signaled only one thing – he’d talked to Lora,
learned what he could, and no doubt was planning on having her sit
in the witness box when Landry’s case went to trial.

So it didn’t matter that Megan had won that
one. No question about it, the verdict from the first case against
Waldoch had come back favorably, with the jury finding that Lora
Alexander didn’t prove her allegations against him. He’d walked out
of the courthouse happy.

But now? Even the revelation about the gifts
to Kathy Landry hadn’t overcome the other killer news in Waldoch’s
testimony – no matter Jeremy’s denial, Lora Alexander was
telling the world he’d given her a gift, too, an expensive one that
Megan never knew about despite a trial. Lora was going to make sure
everyone knew about it this time, though, which meant Megan would
have to deal with her again.

She was almost home when she saw the police
car. It was a block down, with another block to go before her
house. He was pulled off to the side again, lights turning, a car
stopped in front of him in a replay of the scene she’d watched
before.

The policeman was diligently filling out his
paperwork. He scribbled on the bottom of a ticket pad, and he tore
the top sheet off to hand to the driver. He offered a
have a
good day
that Megan actually heard as she passed by on the
opposite side of the street. The spinning police lights turned her
red and then blue, again and again.

He’s set a trap
, she thought,
watching the policeman. He’s found himself a nice spot, and he just
sits there, waiting for someone to come by and fall into it.

A nice trap.

He was gone by the time Megan reached her
house. She climbed the tongue of stairs that led up the small hill
in the front. Onto the porch, where the screen door slammed behind
her, and then she was inside.

Security

Waldoch rarely used the telephones in the
DMW office, and he never used the ones in his home at all. He
avoided payphones wherever they still existed, especially near DMW.
He didn’t even talk on his secure, digital-scrambling cell phones
unless he was someplace that was controlled, someplace that was
confined and protected and checked.

He was in a place like that, the one he used
most. Waldoch was riding in the back of his car, with Russell Haas
driving. The cell phone was in Waldoch’s hand, off, but his thumb
was resting on the buttons.

He was thinking about the deposition. Not in
an examining, evaluating way where he measured and judged each of
his responses. He was thinking about it in the way he typically
assessed things in his life – as an overall reaction to
whether he liked how it turned out.

He was finding that he did. True, it hadn’t
gone exactly as expected. He’d gambled on the questions turning his
way, lost, and paid a price with Megan as a result. But he figured
the risk had been worth it in the first place, and the price for
playing it wrong didn’t seem too costly in the end. She was still
talking to him, after all, and that meant that any negatives from
the deposition were a wash.

Waldoch’s life always showed that type of
black or white, yes or no, do or don’t leap to decisions approach.
He was over-bright but underachieving in school, the person who
felt he always knew what he would be someday but was constantly
halfway to getting there. He burned through four incomplete fields
of study in college before finally graduating, then started and
folded three businesses before going in with two friends to open
DMW, a small security business.

The impatience hadn’t disappeared with that.
Waldoch was always talking – about how they should grow, how
they should move into other businesses and other towns to drive
themselves further, faster, and higher. In every discussion with
his partners, he’d pushed them, until they at last pushed back. And
then he cut them out.

Waldoch ran DMW alone ever since, and on the
outside, it was largely the same place. A small security firm that
provided personnel and advice in the northwest part of Kansas and
greater Kansas City. On the inside, though, it was different.

Under Waldoch, DMW created contacts, at one
key point stumbling into them, and the contacts brought
connections. The contract ties and the services DMW began to
provide, along with unexpected help from unexpected sources, put
Jeremy Waldoch in a position to reach out farther than the regional
Midwest.
Much
farther.

Waldoch worked the phone’s keypad with a
thumb. His gaze was fixed outside the window, the sparse and hilly
countryside sliding through it like a smear on the glass. He
listened absently to the clicks of switches and transfers, and he
spoke only after hearing the beep of a secured and scrambled
connection being established.

He started simply when he spoke. “I have
something I need taken care of.”

Window

Diamonds grow in crystal layers, laid down
in planes. Those planes establish the “grain” of a stone, the
positioning of layers that, when properly addressed, are the paths
that will be cleaved or cut to finish the rough into shapes to be
polished and sold.

The layers are set, forming a unique pattern
that’s fixed in any given stone. Just as the grain of a tree with
its occasional knots defines how lumber looks when it’s finished,
the cleavage planes of diamond rough dictate what finished stones
can be taken from them and how those stones ultimately will appear.
If the cutter can make sure of where the planes are and how they
fit with everything else inside, that is.

Rough diamonds are a fancier’s product,
because at the most basic market level, they’re speculative stocks.
They are potential and risk and nothing more. The
diamantaire
, the dealer who assesses and buys the rough
stones, will either be correct and will benefit, or he’ll be wrong
and will have to wait for another day. And in the neverland moments
between knowing and not knowing how a particular stone will turn
out, the
diamantaire
will live in the excitement of what
might exist in the middle of that stone, with its planes and
flaws.

It’s those moments – the time that
separates seeing the rough for the first time and seeing what it
becomes – that drive
diamantaires
. They thrive on sheer
uncertainty, on the speculation and guessing and evaluating. The
most infected of them will state it plainly –
polished
diamonds are just ruined rough
 – as they thrill on trying
to pry into what a diamond will look like before any cut is ever
made.

The good and solid pink that Anthony Dikembé
had tried to steal, and that Peter Rupert had studied after
Dikembé’s death, went first to Liberia, and then on to Amsterdam.
Robbe Lefevre, a
diamantaire
and contact for Rupert, was
examining the stone there.

It rested on a white pad, untouched at
first, as though it had dropped from the sky and onto the paper at
the small shop, located in an unnoticed building on a nondescript
street corner near the city’s Central Railway Station. Lefevre sat
on a stool, squared off in front of the table and staring down, the
pad a plate and the diamond a piece of food he appeared ready to
eat.

A cutter named Julien Dumont was beside him,
standing out of the light but also fixed on the stone. The men were
mute for five minutes, their heads twisting and angling, Lefevre
occasionally rolling the rough to a new side, then another. His
fingers were blunt, rounded, and short, but the touch he used was
gentle, almost subtle, almost sweet.

He held a viewing loupe in his left hand,
and he took up a marking pen in the other, but he didn’t move
toward the stone with either one. He’d been studying it for a
quarter hour before Dumont arrived, and he already knew his own
view. He was simply filling his hands to keep them away from the
diamond on the table in front of him.

“Well?” he asked.

“It’s sleepy,” Dumont replied.

“It’s no such thing. There’s not a cloudy
spot in it.”

“Here.” Dumont pointed, lightly touching one
end of the stone. “A puff near this end, I think, with a trail
dragging to the heart.”

“You haven’t seen it close enough to even
guess at that, Julien. It’s not sleepy.”

“Fine, then. But there’s a gletz. You’ve
said so yourself. A crack, off center through the height.”

“That is there,” Lefevre conceded. “But
nothing else besides.”

“You say. But I’m not cutting it without a
window.”

“I wouldn’t let you.”

Lefevre handed the pink to Dumont, who
studied it in his palm for a moment before turning to a polishing
wheel. It was the size of an old-style phonograph table, with a
flat and round, spinning plate that was a foot across and topped by
a fine-grit diamond dust surface. Dumont brought the wheel to speed
and bent with a quick and confident, skilled move, deftly and
delicately touching the stone to the turning grain.

A window is a path inside. It’s a porthole
to the diamond’s interior, through which the cutters and
diamantaires
can discern the stone’s shape at the core, not
just in terms of what is visible, but in terms of what
should
be visible and what can be made of it. The most
skilled diamond handlers can look through a window in a piece of
diamond rough and see the best stone or set of stones that can be
cut out of it.

Lefevre could hear Dumont’s reaction before
he could see it. There was a sigh from the polishing table, with a
softly breathed, “
Mon Dieu
” coming after.

“Not so sleepy?” Lefevre asked.

Dumont brought the stone back to the white
pad. He set it down, stepped away, and watched as Lefevre pulled
the light closer before bending to the table. He tucked the loupe
into his eye socket, and he leaned over the stone.

Peter Rupert had been right. The pink color
was better than intense. It was even better than deep. It was alive
in the stone, a smooth, seeping swath of perfectly tinted,
candy-toned pink that might, when cut, edge to purplish-pink. It
was vivid, the deepest possible grade for color. It was a shade
that caught your breath and made you think you’d never catch it
back.

“There is a….” Dumont, suddenly nervous,
cleared his throat. “A gletz,” he said. “Just as you thought.”

“I see it,” Lefevre replied. “One third of
the way across.”

“I believe so, yes. But I could cut….” He
stopped. He swallowed. “I could cut….”

“You could cut on the gletz,” Lefevre
finished for him without looking up. “Fashion three stones from the
piece. A pear and two rounds, perhaps.”

“A pear and two rounds,” Dumont agreed.
“Necklace and earrings. But you’d have to be … you’d have
to be as good with a stone as God Himself.”

“You are.”

“And there’s a feather,” Dumont went on. He
rubbed his head, tangling his hair as though suddenly neurotic or
despondent, and he pointed with his other hand. His voice was
shaking, but his outstretched hand was steady.

“The feather is small,” Lefevre said.
“You’ll use it in the pear, and the price will go up because of
it.” He pulled the loupe from his eye and turned to the cutter
beside him. “It will cut to a Fancy Vivid pink,” he told him.
“There could be a canyon in the middle of it and it’d still be
worth more than we can count, compared to what we spent.”