MOONLIGHT ON DIAMONDS (16 page)

“I bet he was,”
sneered John.

Then she took a step
back and shook her head, recognition coming into her eyes. She’d been through
this too many times before. “You don’t give a damn if Nicholas is a thief.
You’re just jealous.” She shook her head in disgust. “Well, let me tell you
something, John, I don’t like jealous men.”

His mind flashed once
more to the photograph of her on the front page of the
New York Post
after her ex-husband, Derrick Chapin, had thrown her
down the stairs. It was like a slap in the face. She was right. He was so
jealous and angry he could barely speak. He knew he should apologize, but he
was too mad.

“I’m going now to
have dinner with the wife of the President of the United States. As I told you
before, I am also old friends with her. Hopefully you won’t have any objections
to that!” She turned sharply, fury written into every tense line of her body as
she marched out of the room.

Just before she left,
he called out, “For such an antisocial girl, you’re friends with just about
everybody!”

It was childish of
him. She didn’t respond, of course. The door slammed and she was gone.

****

The black sports car
came to a silent stop on the street in front of Senator Hayes’ Capitol Hill
townhouse. Maggie the Cat, clad all in black, slid out of the passenger seat
and shut the door behind her. She winked at René, who sat behind the wheel with
the motor still purring quietly. Maggie motioned for him to cut the lights and
he quickly obeyed.

With a silent leap,
she sprang up and grabbed the bottom branch of the stately old magnolia which
graced the small garden in front of Senator Hayes’ home. In seconds, she had
reached the top of the tree. Uncoiling a slim metal cord from her belt, she
tossed the rubber-coated grappling hook attached to the cord and it hit its
mark. The rubber muffled the sound of the hook catching on the open window of
an upstairs bedroom. Securing the other end of the cord around the tree’s
trunk, Maggie put one foot on the rope, testing it to make sure it could handle
her weight. As gracefully as the cat she was named for, she tiptoed across the
wire and stood just outside the window peering in.

She smiled. It was
the master bedroom, the room where people almost always kept their valuables
when they were not securely locked up in bank safe-deposit boxes. The old
gray-haired senator lay in his striped pajamas with his back to his wife, who
from the look of the prescription bottle of sleeping pills by her bedside, was
down for the count.

A low growling came
from the foot of the bed and a cranky-looking bulldog raised his head.

Looks as though you need a nice sleeping pill like your
mommy.
The fat, slobbering mess of a dog jumped off the bed with a thud, and growling
louder, came toward her.

“
Bonsoir,
” Maggie whispered, as she waved a little doggie treat
laced with a harmless, but extremely effective, sedative through the window.

The bulldog put his
two front paws on the window ledge and sniffed the treat. It must have checked
out, because with a phlegmy snort, he accepted the gift and waddled back to a
corner of the room to enjoy his feast.

The minutes ticked
by, but Marguerite knew better than to enter the room before the dog was fully
sedated. Patience had never been her forte, but she was able to recognize when
it was a necessity.

On the street below,
the flash of headlights spilled across the cobblestones as a car turned onto
the block. Catching her breath, Marguerite leaned as close to the building as
she could, hoping the shadow of the magnolia hid her from view. A midnight blue
Mercedes came to a stop across the street and an older-looking gentleman got
out. He walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened it for a
pretty blonde in a low-cut dress.

Maggie smirked. These
Americans were not so very different from the French after all. She stopped
smirking when the older man frowned and looked at the black Lotus with René
still sitting in the driver’s seat, but relaxed as the blonde slid her arm in
his, and the gentleman quickly led her into his house.

Maggie exhaled. The
young blonde would keep that old man busy and out of her hair, but it would
still be a good idea to get in and out as quickly as possible. She peered in
the window and now the old bulldog was snoring nearly as loudly as his master.
No wonder the lady of the house needed sleeping pills.

Carefully, Maggie
slid the window open a touch more. After all, she wanted a nice wide exit on
her way out—especially if something went wrong. Open windows like this were the
reason spring and fall were her favorite times of year to commit thefts. In the
winter and summer, people kept their windows locked to keep out the elements,
but at the turn of the seasons, who could resist inviting the fresh air into
their home?

Maggie’s foot
silently touched the carpet and she was in the room. There’d be no alarms to
contend with here in the bedroom while the owners of the house slept in it. If
she’d tried to break in downstairs through the back door, it would have been an
entirely different story. Maggie knew better than to pull an amateurish move
like that.

Now, if her friend
Thomas at the Inter-Vac company, who had installed the senator’s safe, was on
the money then what she sought lay behind that atrocious fake Renoir hanging
above the vanity table. It would have been a fun test of her abilities to crack
the safe, but since Thomas had already supplied the code, that would not be
necessary. Soundlessly, she pulled the offending painting off the wall and
placed it on the floor.

Viola! The safe was
just where it was supposed to be.

She considered
switching on the penlight she had brought with her for the occasion, but
excellent night vision was one of her strengths and she could just make out the
letters on the dial.

Not wanting to fuss
with papers in the dark, she had committed the code to memory which had not
been difficult. She put her hand on the dial. Her fingers were sensitive even
encased in gardening gloves with surgical gloves beneath those to prevent that
naughty DNA-holding sweat from getting out onto the dial. She tried the
code—J-E-F-F-E-R-S-O-N.

The metal door swung
open and she caught her breath. This was always the most intoxicating moment.

Apparently the
senator and his wife were a pair of packrats, because the safe was crammed with
all sorts of bonds and papers. Without touching anything, she examined the
contents with her eyes until she noticed a velvet jewel box in the corner.
Maggie slid it out and gently lifted the lid.

The Mogul Emerald
glittered up at her from the silk-lined box. It was a massive 217 carats and
had once been the centerpiece of an Indian maharaja’s turban pin. More recently,
Islamic prayers had been etched into the face of the stone and it was rumored
to have spectacular, protective magical powers. Gleefully Maggie shut the box
and began to tiptoe back across the room just as the old senator stirred.

With those famous cat
instincts, Maggie was plastered against the wall of the tiny hallway between
the bedroom and the bath in the blink of an eye. She stood there, not
breathing, as the senator sat up and rubbed his eyes for a moment.

Merde.

The old man raised
his creaky body from the bed and began to head toward the bathroom—and Maggie.

Thinking fast, Maggie
shoved the velvet box down her body-hugging shirt. She noiselessly gave a
little jump and grasped the top of the molding above the doorway leading to the
bathroom. With a slight kick of her legs, she lifted her body up into a
handstand and balanced precariously upside down above the doorway, thanking God
the place had high ceilings!

She closed her eyes
and prayed to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of thieves, as the old senator
walked though the doorway just below her and into the bathroom. He shut the
door behind him and it was only pure luck that the old man had not noticed his
safe hanging wide open on the wall in the darkness. On his way back to bed, he
might be more alert. She couldn’t take the chance.

Swift as lightning,
she sprang down from the doorway and was out the window and taking a flying
leap from the treetop before René had time to look up. She jumped into the
passenger seat, and giving him a wicked grin, commanded, “DRIVE!”

René put his foot on
the gas. The car went from zero to a hundred and sped off into the night.

Not bad for a warm-up.
Maggie clutched her new good-luck
charm. She rolled the window down so she could feel the wind whipping through her
flame-colored hair. Now she would be invincible at the Diamond Ball.

Upstairs the senator
stood gaping at the open safe.

“Louise, wake up!” he
bellowed at his wife. “Wake up, goddamn it!” But Louise Hayes, still under the
influence of her pills, lay peacefully asleep.

“Goddamn it!” swore
the old man, looking around the room for his dog. “Where’s Jefferson?”

As he looked around,
he heard the bulldog snoring in the corner. Infuriated, he went to Jefferson
and shook him. “Where the hell were you when this happened?”

Jefferson just whined
in his sleep and farted.

“That’s about the
size of it,” said the old man shaking his head in disgust before he picked up
the phone to notify the authorities.

John was fast asleep
when his phone rang. Blindly reaching out his hand in the darkness, he fumbled
for it. His fingers closed around the receiver. “Hello?”

“John…” It was
Veronica. She paused and he was surprised to hear the badly suppressed sound of
her sobs across the line. “My jewels are gone. They’ve been stolen!”

“I’ll be right
there.” John slammed down the phone. He
knew
this was going to happen.

Veronica had dried
her eyes by the time he pulled on some clothes and raced down to her bedroom.
Her eyes were red and puffy and she was paler than her bedsheets. She hadn’t
yet changed out of the black evening gown, but that was all she wore. Her
diamonds were noticeably missing. She looked naked without her sparkling jewels
and he realized it was the first time he had ever seen her unadorned.

“They’re all gone,”
she said, wiping her runny nose with her hand. She sounded as heartbroken as a
mother whose baby had just been kidnapped.

John scanned the
room. “Have you touched anything?”

She shook her head.
“Nothing, there was nothing to touch. The door to my room was locked from the
inside and so are all the windows.”

John walked to the
windows and inspected the locks. It was all as she said. Next he checked the
air conditioning vent, but the screws holding it in were perfectly in place.
There was no other way into the room. “Tell me what happened.”

Veronica sank into a
chair and ran her naked fingers through her hair. “I came home from dinner at
about ten-thirty. I sat down on the loveseat over there by the windows and I
guess I was so tired I fell asleep. When I woke up, I knew something was wrong.
I raised my hand to touch my necklace and it wasn’t there. Then I looked down
and my bracelets were gone, too. Someone slipped the jewelry right off my body
while I was sleeping! How on earth could they do that without waking me up?”

“I don’t know. What
happened after that?”

Her dark blue eyes
welled up and she pointed to the jewelry case resting on her vanity table.
“Well, I went straight to my jewelry case, which I found locked by the way, and
everything inside it was gone.”

John narrowed his
eyes. “The case was locked when you left for dinner?”

She nodded her head.

“And when you went to
look for your jewelry, it was still locked? You had to unlock it to look
inside?”

“That’s right.”

He kneeled in front
of the jewel case being careful not to touch it. “Where’s the key for this?”

“It’s in my purse.
I’ll get it,” she said, rising.

She pulled a deep
burgundy alligator purse out of the closet and produced the key.

“It’s exactly where I
always keep it,” she said, bringing the bag over to him and pointing to a
little zippered compartment inside the purse. “You see?” She shook her head. “I
just don’t understand how all this could have happened while I was asleep in
the room. How did the thief know where my key was? It’s as if…” her voice
trailed off.

“A ghost came and
took them.” John finished her sentence and added, “Or maybe
the Ghost
.”

“Oh God.” She sank
down on the bed and put her head in her hands. “That’s what I was afraid of.
Have you ever recovered anything he’s stolen?”

“I’m not so sure it
is the Ghost.” Though he had to admit it sure as hell seemed like it from
everything he’d ever seen of the elusive jewel thief. “What about Nicholas
Bezuhov? He didn’t pay you a visit tonight, did he?”

She raised her chin,
a little life coming back into her face. “No, he wasn’t here and he didn’t do
this. He’s my good friend, John. He would never in a million years steal from
me. He knows what my jewelry means to me.”