The Bad Place (34 page)

After reengaging both dead bolts, he turned to Bobby. “I never do business in the morning. I take only afternoon appointments.”

“We appreciate the exception you’ve made for us,” Bobby said.

Van Corvaire sighed elaborately. “Well, what is it?”

“I have a stone I’d like you to appraise for me.”

He squinted, which wasn’t appealing, since his eyes were already as narrow as those of a ferret. Before his name change thirty years ago, he’d been Jim Bob Spleener, and a friend would have told him that when he squinted suspiciously he looked very much like a Spleener and not at all like a van Corvaire. “An appraisal? That’s all you want?”

He led them through the small but plush salesroom: hand-textured plaster ceiling; bleached suede walls; whitewashed oak floors; custom area carpet by Patterson, Flynn & Martin in shades of peach, pale blue and sandstone; a modern white sofa flanked by pickled-finish, burlwood tables by Bau; four elegant rattan chairs encircling a round table with a glass top thick enough to survive a blow from a sledgehammer.

One small merchandise display case stood off to the left. Van Corvaire’s business was conducted entirely by appointment; his jewelry was custom designed for the very rich and tasteless, people who would find it necessary to buy hundred-thousand-dollar necklaces to wear to a thousand-dollar-a-plate charity dinner, and never grasp the irony.

The back wall was mirrored, and van Corvaire watched himself with obvious pleasure all the way across the room. He hardly took his eyes off his reflection until he passed through the door into the workroom.

Bobby wondered if the guy ever got so entranced by his image that he walked smack into it. He didn’t like Jim Bob van Corvaire, but the narcissistic creep’s knowledge of gems and jewelry was often useful.

Years ago, when Dakota & Dakota Investigations was just Dakota Investigations, without the ampersand and the redundancy (better never put it that way around Julie, who would appreciate the clever wordplay but would make him eat the “redundancy” part), Bobby had helped van Corvaire recover a fortune in unmounted diamonds stolen by a lover. Old Jim Bob desperately wanted his gems but didn’t want the woman sent to prison, so he went to Bobby instead of to the police. That was the only soft spot Bobby had ever seen in van Corvaire; in the intervening years the jeweler no doubt had grown a callus over it too.

Bobby fished one of the marble-size red stones from his pocket. He saw the jeweler’s eyes widen.

With Clint standing to one side of him, with Bobby behind him and looking over his shoulder, van Corvaire sat on a high stool at a workbench and examined the rough-cut stone through a loupe. Then he put it on the lighted glass table of a microscope and studied it with that more powerful instrument.

“Well?” Bobby asked.

The jeweler did not respond. He rose, elbowing them out of the way, and went to another stool, farther along the workbench. There, he used one scale to weigh the stone and another to determine if its specific gravity matched that of any known gems.

Finally, he moved to a third stool that was positioned in front of a vise. From a drawer he withdrew a ring box in which three large, cut gems lay on a square of blue velvet.

“Junk diamonds,” he said.

“They look nice to me,” Bobby said.

“Too many flaws.”

He selected one of those stones and fixed it in the vise with a couple of turns of the crank. Gripping the red beauty in a small pair of pliers, he used one of its sharper edges to attempt to score the polished facet of the diamond in the vise, pressing with considerable effort. Then he put the pliers and red gem aside, picked up another jeweler’s loupe, leaned forward, and studied the junk diamond.

“A faint scratch,” he said. “Diamond cuts diamond.” He held the red stone between, thumb and forefinger, staring at it with obvious fascination—and greed. “Where did you get this?”

“Can’t tell you,” Bobby said. “So it’s just a red diamond?”

“Just?
The red diamond may be the rarest precious stone in the world! You must let me market it for you. I have clients who’d pay anything to have this as the centerstone of a necklace or pendant. It’ll probably be too big for a ring even after final cut. It’s huge!”

“What’s it worth?” Clint asked.

“Impossible to say until it’s finish-cut. Millions, certainly.”

“Millions?” Bobby said doubtfully. “It’s big but not
that
big.”

Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from the stone and looked up at Bobby. “You don’t understand. Until now, there were only seven known red diamonds in the world. This is the eighth. And when it’s cut and polished, it’ll be one of the two largest. This comes as close to priceless as anything gets.”

OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire’s small shop, where heavy traffic roared past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight flashing off the chrome and glass, it was hard to believe that the tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were just beyond the buildings on the far side of the street. In a sudden moment of enlightenment, Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly everyone else’s) was like this street at this precise point in time: all bustle and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of the herd, to achieve something and transcend the frantic whirl of commerce, thereby earning respite for reflection and a shot at serenity—when all the time serenity was only a few steps away, on the far side of the street, just out of sight.

That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the Pollard case was somehow a trap—or, more accurately, a squirrel cage that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a footing on its rotating floor. He stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling ensnared, caged. At that moment he was not sure why, in spite of the obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank’s problems and put all that he cared about at risk. He knew now that the reasons he had quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the excitement of a wildly different kind of job—were merely justifications, not reasons, and that his true motivation was something he did not yet understand.

Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as Clint started the engine.

“Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in the mason jar? A hundred?”

“More. A couple hundred.”

“Worth what—hundreds of millions?”

“Maybe a billion or more.”

They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke. It wasn’t that no words were adequate to the situation; instead, there was too
much
to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.

At last Bobby said, “But you couldn’t convert the stones to cash, not quickly anyway. You’d have to dribble them onto the market over a lot of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but also to avoid causing a sensation, drawing unwanted attention, and maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions.”

“After they’ve mined diamonds for hundreds of years, all over the world, and only found seven red ones ... where the hell did Frank come up with a jarful?”

Bobby shook his head and said nothing.

Clint reached into his pants pocket and withdrew one of the diamonds, smaller than the specimen that Bobby had brought for Archer van Corvaire’s appraisal. “I took this home to show it to Felina. I was going to return it to the jar when I got to the office, but you hustled me out before I had a chance. Now that I know what it is, I don’t want it in my possession a minute longer.”

Bobby took the stone and put it in his pocket with the larger diamond. “Thank you, Clint.”

DR. DYSON MANFRED’S study, in his house in Turtle Rock, was the most uncomfortable place Bobby had ever been. He had been happier last week, flattened on the floor of his van, trying to avoid being chopped to bits by automatic weapons fire than he was among Manfred’s collection of many-legged, carapaced, antenna-bristled, mandibled, and thoroughly repulsive exotic bugs.

Repeatedly, in his peripheral vision, Bobby saw something move in one of the many glass-covered boxes on the wall, but every time he turned to ascertain which hideous creature was about to slip out from under the frame, his fear proved unfounded. All of the nightmarish specimens were pinned and motionless, lined up neatly beside one another, none missing. He also would have sworn that he heard things skittering and slithering inside the shallow drawers of the many cases that he knew contained more insects, but he supposed that those sounds were every bit as imaginary as the phantom movement glimpsed from the corners of his eyes.

Though he knew Clint to be a born stoic, Bobby was impressed by the apparent ease with which the guy endured the creepy-crawly decor. This was an employee he must never lose. He decided on the spot to give Clint a significant raise in salary before the day was out.

Bobby found Dr. Manfred nearly as disquieting as his collection. The tall, thin, long-limbed entomologist seemed to be the offspring of a professional basketball player and one of those African stick insects that you saw in nature films and hoped never to encounter in real life.

Manfred stood behind his desk, his chair pushed out of the way, and they stood in front of it. Their attention was directed upon a two-foot-long, one-foot-wide, white-enamel, inch-deep lab tray which occupied the center of the desktop and over which was draped a small white towel.

“I have had no sleep since Mr. Karaghiosis brought this to me last night,” Manfred said, “and I won’t sleep much tonight, either, just turning over all the remaining questions in my mind. This dissection was the most fascinating of my career, and I doubt that I’ll ever again experience anything in my life to equal it ”

The intensity with which Manfred spoke-and the implication that neither good food nor good sex, neither a beautiful sunset nor a fine wine, could be a fraction as satisfying as insect dismemberment—gave Bobby a queasy stomach.

He glanced at the fourth man in the room, if only to divert his attention briefly from their bugophile host. The guy was in his late forties, as round as Manfred was angular, as pink as Manfred was pale, with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He sat on a chair in the corner, straining the seams of his gray jogging suit, with his hands fisted on his heavy thighs, looking like a good Boston Irish fellow who had been trying to eat his way into a career as a Sumo wrestler. The entomologist hadn’t introduced or even referred to the well-padded observer. Bobby figured that introductions would be made when Manfred was ready. He decided not to force the issue—if only because the round man silently regarded them with a mixture of wonder, suspicion, fear, and intense curiosity that encouraged Bobby to believe they would not be pleased to hear what he had to tell them when, at last, he spoke.

With long-fingered, spidery hands—which Bobby might have sprayed with Raid if he’d had any—Dyson Manfred removed the towel from the white-enamel tray, revealing the remains of Frank’s insect. The head, a couple of the legs, one of the highly articulated pincers, and a few other unidentifiable parts had been cut off and put aside. Each grisly piece rested on a soft pad of what appeared to be cotton cloth, almost as a jeweler might present a fine gem on velvet to a prospective buyer. Bobby stared at the plum-size head with its small reddish-blue eye, then at its two large muddy-yellow eyes that were too similar in color to Dyson Manfred’s. He shivered. The main part of the bug was in the middle of the tray, on its back. The exposed underside had been slit open, the outer layers of tissue removed or folded back, and the inner workings revealed.

Using the gleaming point of a slender scalpel, which he handled with grace and precision, the entomologist began by showing them the respiratory, ingestive, digestive, and excretory systems of the bug. Manfred kept referring to the “great art” of the biological design, but Bobby saw nothing that equaled a painting by Matisse; in fact, the guts of the thing were even more repellent than its exterior. One term—“polishing chamber”—struck him as odd, but when he asked for a further explanation, Manfred only said, “in time, in time,” and went on with his lecture.