The Eighth Commandment (42 page)

“I leave you to the tender mercies of your wife, Mr. Havistock,” he said. “Lots of luck.”

It wasn’t until we were down on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house that we stopped to grin at each other.

“Dunk,” Al said, “you’re a genius.” And he leaned forward to kiss my cheek.

“A double-genius,” Jack said, kissing the other cheek. “A triple-genius! Al, how do you feel about this female-type detective making us look like a couple of klutzes?”

“I love it,” Georgio said. “I’m going to take all the credit at the Department for closing the file. Aren’t you going to take all the credit with your company?”

“You bet your sweet ass,” Jack said. “The coin has been returned; that’s all we were interested in. Al, Havistock is going to walk, isn’t he?”

“Sure he is,” Al said. “What could we charge him with? All those things I threatened—so much kaka. I could have done all that, but it wouldn’t have convicted him of anything. Just made his life more miserable than it is now. Let him walk; I’ve got the coin.”

“If you’re not going to arrest him,” I said, “what do you need the Demaretion for?” And I whisked the box from under Al’s arm. “It belongs to me. I signed for it.”

He looked at me a moment, startled. Then he laughed. “You’re right, Dunk, it’s yours. Want us to escort you back to Grandby’s?”

“Nope,” I said, “I’m going to do this my way. If someone tries to mug me, you’ll have another homicide to investigate. Not mine; the mugger’s.”

“Be careful, Dunk,” Jack warned.

“Talk to you guys later,” I said, and went breezing away.

It was late in the afternoon, and I knew my chances of getting a cab were nil. So I practically ran back to Grandby & Sons, hugging the Demaretion to what I laughingly call my bosom and trying not to shout with triumph.

I dashed up the stairs to my old office and banged on the door, then started kicking it. Hobart Juliana peered at me through the peephole, then unlocked.

“Dunk,” he said, bewildered, “what on earth…?”

“Look!” I yelled. “Just look at this!”

I slid the display case from the box and placed it on Hobie’s desk. He bent over to inspect that single coin nestled on velvet in the middle compartment. Then he straightened and turned to me.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “The Demaretion. Dunk, it’s glorious!”

“Yes,” I said, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. “It’s so lovely, so lovely.”

He gave a whoop of delight, grabbed me, and we went dancing around the office, banging into tables and desks, holding each other and so excited and joyous I didn’t think I could stand it.

Hobie stopped suddenly. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve got to impress Madam Dodat and god with your incredible victory.”

So, with me carrying the display case, we sped into Felicia Dodat’s office, barging by her indignant secretary. Felicia looked up, shocked by this sudden intrusion. I plunked the display case down on her desk.

“There it is,” I said. “The Demaretion.”

She stared at it a moment. “Oh, Dunk,” she said, “isn’t that
nice
! I must call Mr. Grandby. He’ll be so
pleased
.”

Within ten minutes there must have been a dozen people crammed into Felicia’s office, all bending to examine that old Greek coin and laughing, kissing me, or shaking my hand. God was there, but all he could say was, “Well, well, well.” He kept repeating it: “Well, well, well.” Everyone wanted to know how I had recovered it, but I just smiled mysteriously and winked. A great moment in my life. Dunk shot.

Finally Madam Dodat shooed everyone out of her office except for Mr. Grandby, Hobie, and me.

“All right, Dunk,” she said, giving me her toothy smile, “now tell us how you did it.”

I had my story ready. I told them that Archibald Havistock was an impassioned collector and, at the last minute, just couldn’t let go of the Demaretion. I told them nothing of his relationship with his daughter-in-law or of his being blackmailed by his nephew. If the tabloids got hold of the story, everyone would know the details soon enough, but they weren’t going to hear them from me.

They accepted my version readily enough, and we all agreed that true collectors were infected with a mania that could never be cured. Then the four of us formed a triumphal procession down to the vaults, god carrying the display case, and saw it safely locked away.

“Well, well, well,” Mr. Grandby said, beaming, “I think this calls for a celebration. Will you join me for dinner?”

So we did, adjourning to the Bedlington dining room where we all had Chateaubriand with the best béarnaise sauce I’ve ever tasted. And two bottles of champagne. My employer was acting in a most unpenguinlike manner. He even leaned over to whisper in my ear that I could expect a salary raise for my “remarkable efforts” on behalf of Grandby & Sons.

We parted about eight o’clock. God and Felicia Dodat went off together—to an apartment on East 65th Street, I wondered? Hobie and I embraced on the sidewalk, and I swore I would be in to work first thing Monday morning. Then he left to return to his consenting adult. I cabbed home alone.

There was nothing interesting in my mail—just bills and junk. So I kicked off my shoes and sprawled on the couch, beginning to feel a letdown after all the day’s excitement. There was no reason I should have felt depressed—I had won, hadn’t I?—but I did.

Then I realized what was saddening me was the fate of Archibald Havistock. I had thought of him as a statue, but now he was overturned, broken, and crumbling. I tried to understand how that could have happened. He was an intelligent and rational man; how could he have acted as stupidly as he did?

Perhaps it was male menopause. Perhaps it was nothing more than lust for a young, lubricious body. But I thought it was more than that. He was a deep man and must have known exactly how foolish it was to become enthralled by his son’s wife, a doxy, and risk the happiness of his home. But he could not resist.

Suddenly it occurred to me that he might actually have been in love with her. It was possible. That reserved, magisterial,
complete
man may have, for the first time in his life, felt an overwhelming passion that gave new meaning to his life. He surrendered to that surge, not caring, because it was new to him and he had never learned to cope with such fervid emotions.

But whatever his motives or obsessions, nothing could excuse his illogical conduct.

I sighed and went into the bedroom to phone. I had two calls to make. The first to Al Georgio, telling that estimable man that no, I would not marry him. The second to Jack Smack, telling that flighty tap dancer that yes, I would move in with him.

You can be logical about other people’s lives, but never about your own.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Commandment Series

I
T WAS A SWELL
year. In January, her boss, Mike Trevalyan, sent Dora up to Boston to look into a claim on a homeowners’ policy. This yuppie couple had gone to New York for the weekend and returned Sunday night to find their condo looted. They said. All their furniture and paintings had disappeared. They had made a videotape to record their possessions, and wanted the Company to fork over the full face value of the policy: $50,000.

It took her two days to discover that the yuppies were bubbleheads with a fondness for funny cigarettes. Every piece of furniture in their pad, every painting, had been leased; they didn’t own a stick. They thought all they’d have to do was take out an insurance policy, pay the first year’s premium, sell off their rented furnishings, and file a claim. Hah!

In February, Dora went to Portland to investigate a claim on a quilt factory that had been totaled by an early-morning fire. The local fire laddies couldn’t find any obvious evidence of arson, but the quilt company was having trouble paying its bills, and that two-mil casualty policy the owner carried must have looked mighty sweet.

It took her a week to figure out how it had been done. The boss had pulled a wooden table directly under a low-hanging light bulb. He had heaped the table with cotton batting. Then he had draped the 150-watt bulb with gauze, switched on the light, and strolled away, humming “Blue Skies.” The heat of the bulb ignited the gauze, which fell onto the batting, and eventually the whole factory was torched.

In April, she went to Stamford to look into a claim for the theft of a Picasso pencil sketch from a posh art gallery. The drawing was valued at $100,000. She was in Stamford less than a day when the Company got a phone call from a man claiming to be the thief and offering to sell the artwork back for twenty-five grand. Trevalyan called Dora and told her to liaise with the FBI.

After several phone calls, she set up a meet with the crook in a shopping mall parking lot. She handed over the marked cash, received the drawing, and the FBI moved in. The artwork turned out to be a fake, and the thief turned out to be the lover of the art gallery owner who had filed the claim. He had engineered the whole deal and had the real Picasso sketch in his safe deposit box.

In May and June, every claim Dora investigated was apparently on the up-and-up. Everyone seemed to be honest, and it worried her; she feared she had overlooked something.

But things got back to normal in July.

It happened just outside of Providence at the summer home of a Wall Street investment banker. His wife said there had been a power failure shortly before midnight. The banker stumbled around in the darkness, found a flashlight, and started down the basement stairs to check the circuit breakers. The wife heard him shriek and the sound of his fall. A few moments later the lights came back on, and she had hurried to the basement to find her husband crumpled at the foot of the stairs. Broken neck. Very dead.

Dora got there a day after it happened, and the wife’s story sounded fishy to her. It took on a more profound piscine scent when she noted, and pointed out to the investigating detectives, that although all the electric clocks in the house showed a loss of about twenty minutes, corroborating the wife’s tale, the timing clock on their VCR hadn’t been reset and showed the power had gone off at 9:30
P.M.
that evening.

Questioning of neighborhood yentas suggested that the wife had been having a torrid affair with their part-time gardener, a husky youth who studied the martial arts and frequently competed in karate tournaments. The gardener might have been physically strong, but there was little between his ears. He broke first and admitted he had taken part in a murder plot devised by the wife.

She had smuggled him into the basement late that afternoon while her husband was out playing croquet. At 9:30
P.M.,
the lover cut the power at the main switch. The banker came cautiously down the basement stairs. The gardener caught his ankle and after he fell, broke his neck. Power was restored, and they let the electric clocks show a lapse of twenty minutes. But they forgot about the VCR timer. Their motive?

The banker’s life insurance, of course. And love, Dora supposed.

In September, she went to Manhattan where a local politico claimed his Hatteras 37 Convertible had been stolen from the 79th Street boat basin. It took Dora less than a week to discover he had
given
the yacht to his ex-mistress, a vengeful woman who had threatened to talk to the tabloids about his bedroom peccadilloes. These included, she said, a fondness for wearing her lingerie—and she had the Polaroids to prove it.

Dora found the boat moored at City Island. The ex-mistress had changed the name on the transom from
Our Thing
to
My Thing.

October was filled with a number of routine cases, but in November Dora investigated the claim of a wizened dealer in autographs and signed historical documents. He said the gems of his collection, several rather raunchy letters from Samuel Clemens to his brother, had been stolen from his shop. The Worcester police told Dora that the store showed every evidence of a break-in, but they couldn’t understand why other valuable items on display hadn’t been taken, unless it was a contract burglary: The thief had been paid to lift the Mark Twain items and none others.

Dora came close to okaying the claim until she noticed (“You’re a pain in the ass,” Mike Trevalyan had once told her, “but you’re observant as hell.”) that the office walls in the dealer’s musty shop had recently been repapered. It seemed strange that the dealer would spend money to brighten his private sanctum while the remainder of his store looked like the loo in the House of Usher.

She hired a local PI with more nerve than scruples, and one dark night they picked the front door lock of the dealer’s shop. It took them less than a half-hour to find the Samuel Clemens letters, in plastic slips, concealed beneath the new wallpaper in the back office. It turned out that the dealer was suffering a bad case of the shorts, having conceived an unholy passion for a tootsie one-third his age whose motto was “No pay, no play.”

Dora returned home to Hartford to find her husband, Mario Conti, planning their Thanksgiving Day dinner. He had been a long-haul trucker when she married him, but had since been promoted to dispatcher. However, his real kingdom was the kitchen. He loved to cook and had the talents of a cordon-bleu, which was why Dora, who stood five-three in her Peds, usually weighed 150 pounds (or 145 during semimonthly diets). But Mario had never called her “dumpling” or “butterball,” the darling man.