The Tavernier Stones (14 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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Despite the effort, no feeling of remorse came over him. The fool should not have stopped and gotten out of his car.
 
At least, John noted, there was plenty of room to park. Not that three empty spaces in a row would make it any easier for him to line up his Ford Galaxie 500 collinearly with the other cars parked on Volta Street. He was the worst driver in the world with a driver’s license. In fact, there were people who had never earned a license who were better.
Hell, there were
animals
who could claim greater proficiency.
He aimed for the center of the three empty spots, screeched to a halt, and climbed out to evaluate. The front right tire was up on the curb and the left rear bumper poked out into the street. But there was still enough room for other drivers to get by, if they took turns. Not bad, he thought.
He was disappointed in South Philadelphia, to say the least. Narrow row houses elbowed for frontage, each distractedly clutching its whining air conditioner like old women lugging noisy, unwanted children on their hips. Windows were boarded up, even on houses still inhabited, and garbage spilled liberally onto sidewalks from untied plastic bags. And if the cars that were parked on the curbs ran at all, they didn’t run downtown, where they were safer anyway from theft than ridicule. A 1950s central business district had drifted out of the mainstream of city life and was struggling now like a salmon too weak to fight the current.
The house at the address Dr. Bancroft had given John looked no better or worse than its neighbors; all were vying to be the first to tumble down. What would he say to the current resident if David Feinstein no longer lived there? More to the point, what would he say if he did?
There was no sound when he pressed the doorbell, and no one answered his knock.
He paced up and down the sidewalk a couple of times, trying to look as though he were expecting someone. What to do now—come back another time? No, he had waited through yesterday, the Sabbath, and had fidgeted all day at work today, watching the clock. It had taken too long to get to Volta Street in the Philadelphia traffic, not even counting the times he got lost; he didn’t want to make the drive again.
He went back to the door and knocked again. Then, yielding to the urge he had always heeded in the English world, he turned the knob. The door opened.
“Hello? Hello?”
The living room was incredibly narrow; a large beanbag chair almost spanned its width. Comically, the chair was bleeding beans.
“Hello?”
He heard noises coming from the rear of the house and followed them. In the bedroom, a woman was on her knees with her back to the door, rummaging through a dresser drawer, cussing loudly and creatively.
“Hello?”
The woman looked up, startled.
“I’m sorry, but your door was open, and no one answered when I knocked.”
She scrambled to her feet and fixed her hair. “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”
John laughed nervously. “No, I’m not a policeman, if that’s what you mean. My name is Graf.” He handed her a business card. “I’m looking for someone named David Feinstein. I don’t even know whether he lives here anymore.”
“Then you
are
from the police.”
“I swear to you, I am not. Just look at the card.”
She did, then cast her eyes back at him suspiciously.
“I’m a cartographer. I was told a man named Feinstein lived here. He’s supposed to be a gemologist. Do you know him? Was he the previous tenant?”
“Yes, Feinstein is the name of the previous tenant.”
The woman was regaining her composure. John had thought she was attractive at first, but now he realized he was in the presence of a great beauty.
“Can you tell me where he lives now? I would really like to find him.”
“He moved out last night.”
“Last night?”
She eased the dresser drawer shut with one leg. “Yes, last night. You want his new address?”
“Please.”
“It’s on Eighth and Race.”
John made a note. “And the number?”
“I don’t know the number. It’s the Roundhouse, the only building on Eighth and Race.”
“The Roundhouse being …”
“Philadelphia police headquarters.”
“Oh. He’s in jail?”
“Where, in all likelihood, he will remain for some time to come. If he’s lucky, Mr. Freeman’s—excuse me, Feinstein’s—
carcass
may someday be eligible for parole.”
By now the woman had completely regained her composure. She seemed polished, even professional. If John hadn’t met her under the present circumstances, surprising her while she rummaged through a drawer of undergarments in a ramshackle house on a slimy street, he would have guessed she was a fashion model. A
top
fashion model.
“I’m an ex-acquaintance of Mr. Feinstein’s,” the woman explained. “I’m just here to fetch some personal belongings.”
She was standing with one leg in front of the other and a hand on her hip, obviously posing. She was strikingly good looking, knew it, and knew John thought so too.
“Thanks for the information,” he said. “Sorry about the intrusion.”
“Not at all.”
 
“You just missed him,” the duty sergeant at the Roundhouse told John. “We released him twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s in keeping with my luck so far.”
“You want some advice?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know why you’re looking for this guy. If you’re a private detective, fine. But if you’re a cart—, a cart—”
“Cartographer.”
“Cartographer, right.” He snorted. “That’s a good one. I’ll have to use it myself sometime.”
“The advice, sergeant?”
“The advice is, this guy’s rotten to the core. We had him in here a while back for selling fake emeralds as the real stuff.”
“I know about that one.” Bancroft had told him about it—labgrown crystals glued into matrix and passed off as genuine.
“Okay, let’s see if you know about this one: he once did a daytime job in a jewelry store. Tied up the salespeople in a back room and proceeded to fill bags with merchandise. When a customer came in, Feinstein—or Freeman, whatever—sold the guy an engagement ring, for cash. Right there in the middle of the robbery. Conducted a goddamn sale! He was so proud of himself, he didn’t even pocket the money, he left it in the cash register. We’d probably still have him now for that job, but none of the witnesses would identify him in a lineup. Seems he has
charisma
. So we had to let him go. If I were you, I’d keep my distance.”
“You had him in here again today.”
“And had to let him go again. Although we picked him up yesterday on an anonymous tip, reinforced by his record, of course, it turns out the jewelry store he was supposed to have robbed—one on Sansom Street—had not reported anything stolen. I’m only telling you this because you’re a detective. Sorry, a
cartographer
. Anyway, I went to the store myself and spoke to the assistant manager, Mr. Bowling, personally. There had been no robbery, he assured me. And nothing whatsoever was missing from the inventory.”
 
That evening, Sarah walked to Broad Street, carrying one small suitcase, and hailed a cab. “Penn Center Station,” she told the driver.
The car sped up Broad into the dancing lights of downtown Philadelphia like a soul gleefully escaping purgatory. As the driver circled City Hall to JFK Boulevard, Sarah tried to decide just where it was she intended to go.
New York City was the place to launch—or in her case, relaunch—a modeling career, but she had her heart set on someplace warm. Atlanta sounded good. It was big and it was warm. Maybe she should first find out all the places the trains did go, then pick one of them.
She descended into the station at JFK and Sixteenth and wandered through the maze of restaurants and shops until she found a ticket window. With the entire contents of her wallet laid bare on the counter, she was about to ask, How far will this get me? when it occurred to her how cliché the question would sound.
Just as she was opening her mouth to speak, a hand clamped down on her shoulder. She whirled around. It was David.
“Don’t go just yet,” he said. His face registered an earnest calm she had never seen before.
“We’re finished, David.”
“Stick around a little longer,” he implored. “Zimmerman gave me a clue. And I just figured it out.”
THIRTEEN
 
JOHN OFTEN VISITED LANCASTER Cemetery to work out problems. He liked to wander among the granite and marble monuments, some weathered and faded, some listing, some fallen, and sit on tree stumps that broke the textural monotony of quiescent graves.
The cemetery clipped a squat rectangle from the north side of town, truncating streets and flattening the topography within its boundaries. But only on a map: it hardly existed for most of the living, who skirted it hurriedly to avoid an unsettling reminder of their final destination.
As if to symbolize the breadth of the journey, Lancaster General Hospital was across Lime Street to the west, and an elementary school, a junior high school, and a high school were clustered a quarter of a mile to the east. On their way home from school, children ran their hands along the cemetery’s spiked iron fence, playing it like a harp.
The Winterbottoms, Ramsey (1865-1933) and Rosalie (1865- 1936), were buried near the circular walkway in the middle of the cemetery. It was the oldest real estate on the grounds, where august families had long staked claims to choice plots, and where vacancies were rare and few of the living bothered any longer to stop by. John wondered what the Winterbottoms would think if they knew that he, born more than four decades after Rosalie’s death, was their only regular visitor.
On Tuesday the problem John needed to work out was one the like of which he had never experienced before: he was dwelling more than he thought he should on finding a lost cache of legendary jewels.
It was wonderful that Johannes Cellarius had been found—no argument there. Now he could receive a proper burial, and historians might even figure out who killed him and why; age-old questions were about to be answered. Perhaps more importantly, Cellarius had come to the attention of a public that was otherwise apathetic about maps.

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