A Diamond Before You Die Read online

  A Diamond Before You Die

  Chris Wiltz

  For Joe

  CONTENTS

  1. The Man in the Fireplace

  2. A Drink with Maurice

  3. Colonel Cotton’s Estate

  4. The Lure of the Diamond

  5. Simpático

  6. Detective Without a Case

  7. Breakfast with the Old Man

  8. The Murder of Marty Solarno

  9. Fish Out of Water

  10. Memories and Delusions

  11. Monuments to the Past

  12. A Diamond Before You Die

  13. My Ticket to the Action

  14. Mr. D.’s Laundry

  15. The Party

  16. The Silver Seal

  17. Mardi Gras Madness

  18. Everyone Needs a Vice

  19. Twice Violated

  20. Runnin’ Scared

  21. Pal Danny

  22. The Alleyway

  23. Not Even a Body

  24. Because of Myra

  25. Hurricane-ville

  26. Whistling in the Dark

  27. Rain

  28. Come Live with Me

  29. The Trade-Off

  30. The Standoff

  31. A Whiter Shade of Pale

  32. Epilogue

  1

  * * *

  The Man in the Fireplace

  I went over to Richard Cotton’s house that night to tell him I’d followed his wife out to the airport and seen her get on a plane going to Mexico City. The part I supposed he’d be most interested in was that she’d been alone.

  His Mercedes wasn’t in the driveway, but it could have been in the garage so I went to the door anyway. I was ringing the doorbell for the second time when I heard a crash.

  “Richard!” I yelled, and started shaking the doorknob and pounding on the door.

  I ran across the porch to the living room windows—floor to ceiling, double-hung French windows. They were too heavily curtained to see through. I put my ear up to a pane of glass. The sounds were muffled, but there was a struggle going on inside. I tried the windows knowing they’d be locked, then I listened again. This time I heard nothing, and that sounded even more ominous. I went back to the door and tried to kick it in, but my legs were going to splinter before that double-bolted solid oak did. So I ran down the porch, picked up a small wrought-iron chair and pitched it through a window.

  What I saw and heard when I stumbled past drapes, wing chairs and tiny tables toward the flickering firelight was almost too much to take in at once. There were the hissing sounds a fire makes when something wet hits it; there was a sickening smell that my mind fought against identifying. And there was a woman standing there watching a man roast in the fireplace.

  It was the man’s head that was roasting, actually. The rest of his body, twisted from writhing, lay across the hearth and the rug, part of the collapsed fireplace screen underneath him. He had a death-tight grip on the poker.

  I recovered from the assault on my senses, got past a long sofa and some other furniture, and pulled him out of the fire by his ankles. Only the sight of his raw, blistered face made the woman stop looking at him and look at me.

  “What were you going to do, let him burn to death?” I asked her angrily.

  I turned the lights on, found a phone and called for a crash truck and the cops.

  Her name was Lee Diamond. When I returned to the living room she was still standing over the man who didn’t have much of a face left. I asked her what she was doing in Cotton’s house, and as she turned her head to answer, her face contracted in a spasm of pain. Her hand went up to hold the side of her neck. I had to step over the burned man’s legs to get to her. Under the cowl of her thick sweater, at the base of her neck, above her left shoulder, was a very ugly mark, inflamed and swelling. I tested the sponginess over her collarbone to see if it was broken, but with a swift and surprisingly strong movement she flung my hand away from her. She started moving toward the sofa, stumbling on the man’s leg, then on me. She resisted my help at first, but leaned into me as I got her past the obstacles, which included an overturned end table and shattered lamp. She sunk into the sofa cushions, holding her neck again.

  A patrol car arrived first, followed closely by the paramedics. Detective Lieutenant Roderick Rankin and his sidekick Phil Fonte brought up the rear. I’d put a special call in to Rankin because he’s my old man’s best friend and would have expected me to, and because if this was an attempted homicide he would have been there anyway. Usually when Uncle Roddy and I meet in any kind of professional capacity he has a few snide words for me—I’ve come to regard this as his way of showing me affection when he’s surrounded by his subordinates—but not this time. This time the burn victim’s presence cut short any cute exchanges. Uncle Roddy put himself and his men at the paramedics’ disposal while they did what they had to, though he did tell Fonte to go check the rest of the place. I told Uncle Roddy that the lady might have a broken collarbone, and I went into the kitchen to make an ice pack. When I came back, I was relieved to see the paramedics wheeling the man away on a stretcher.

  Lee Diamond was saying that she didn’t want to go in the crash truck, that she didn’t think her collarbone was broken, that she’d rather go to Touro Infirmary than Charity Hospital, which was where they were taking the burned man.

  She stopped Uncle Roddy’s attempt to get her immediate medical attention. “I’d rather answer all of your questions right here, right now, Lieutenant.” She shuddered when I put the ice pack down inside the cowl.

  She said the man tried to kill her. She’d been sitting outside the house in her car when she thought she saw the front door open. None of the outside lights were on in the front, so she got out of the car to see what was going on. She crept down behind the hedges in the shadow of some azalea bushes. Almost immediately the man jumped her. He strong-armed her into the house with an effective throat hold and shoved her into the living room. That’s when she started fighting back. They grappled with each other for a while, upsetting the table, smashing the lamp, and then he swung the poker at her.

  This was some strong woman, because even after the blow she’d taken, she managed to knee him in the groin with enough force that he fell back, struck his head on the fireplace bricks, and continued falling into the fire.

  She didn’t appear to be particularly strong. Her height was average and so was her build. I took her to be in her early thirties, but in tight black jeans and that big sweater she could have been a little on the slight side, both of build and age—probably about thirty. Her hair was brown, shoulder length, and her eyes were hazel, almost yellow in the firelight, just hazel once I’d turned on the living room lights.

  But if you think this is the ordinary description of some ordinary woman, let me tell you she was not, and it had nothing so much to do with her looks. She was good-looking all right, but what was not at all ordinary was the way she carried herself, even with the injury, even when she was stumbling. There was a readiness about her, a tenseness, but it was very quiet, very cool. It had nothing to do with being nervous or anxious. It had nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of performance or any kind of impression she was trying to create.

  My guess, in fact, was that she could blend in anywhere, become nearly invisible and seem very ordinary. But not if she didn’t want to, not if she was focused on you. What was not ordinary at all was the way she could get you to react to her, and then, as I found out later, if she wanted to, make you change your reaction.

  Already Uncle Roddy was at bay.

  “Miss Diamond,” he said so nicely, “what exactly were you doing sitting outside the house in your car?” Uncle Roddy’s best smile is usually a grim
ace or a sardonic leer, but the way his fat cheeks were folded back on his big face right now was something to see. Uncle Roddy was smiling to beat the band. His normally dopey-looking eyes still had their lids halfway down, but there were these little crinkles all around them that I’d never seen before, and I don’t remember when I didn’t know Uncle Roddy.

  “Just what you would think, Lieutenant,” she said. “I was staking out the house.” There was not a hint of patronization or sarcasm in her voice. She was businesslike.

  “Are you licensed as a private detective, Miss Diamond?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m sure you know how helpful it would be if you would elaborate.”

  “I do, Lieutenant, and I’m sure you know that total elaboration is not always possible. I’m not free to elaborate.”

  If I had handed Uncle Roddy that elaboration line, he’d be threatening to take my license away.

  “Can you tell me who your client is?” he asked her instead.

  “I’m not free to tell you that.”

  By now Uncle Roddy would have me on the way to jail for withholding evidence. But all he said to her was, “Can you get in touch with your client quickly, Miss Diamond, as soon as you get that injury taken care of?”

  “My client is out of the country. There will be some delay.”

  “Where is your client?”

  She said with such calm, “I’m not free to tell you that. What I can tell you, Lieutenant, is that I’ve been staking out this house off and on for a couple of weeks, and I’ve never seen that man here before.” I tell you there was not a hint of ingratiation.

  Fonte walked in while she was giving Uncle Roddy this handsome bit of information.

  “No sign of forced entry, Lieutenant. There’s another house out back but it’s dark and all locked up.”

  The first flash of irritation crossed Uncle Roddy’s face. “All right, Fonte.” Then, “Miss Diamond, let’s talk about all this tomorrow after you’ve made sure your collarbone’s in one piece. Sergeant Fonte will see that you get to the hospital.”

  It seemed to me that Uncle Roddy wanted Fonte out of the way for a while, though he’d taken Fonte under his wing much the same way my father had taken Uncle Roddy under his thirty-plus years ago. But this partnership wasn’t charmed the way the Rankin-Rafferty partnership had been. Of course, those two men were a lot closer in age; Fonte’s of another generation. And it’s true that the old man is probably the only person in the world who doesn’t irritate Uncle Roddy. They like to sit around together, drinking beer and talking about the old days and how they don’t make cops the way they used to. They’re usually talking about the incompetents on the force, but I’ve been used as an example to bear out this statement since I managed to get myself thrown off the force because of the Angelesi–Myra Ledet business. I wonder how many times I’ve been told that any other cop in the city of New Orleans would have known when to close his eyes and when to open them again.

  “Fine, Lieutenant,” Lee Diamond said. She let Uncle Roddy help her up from the sofa. She smiled at him, told him she’d be in his office first thing in the morning, then she turned around and thanked me before she left with Fonte.

  “Jesus, it’s hot in here,” Uncle Roddy said. “Let’s get some windows open.”

  “I already got one open,” I said. “Let’s get away from this fire.”

  The house was one of those Victorian double parlor layouts. With the sliding double doors between them open, the two rooms were like one big room. We went back into the first parlor where I’d thrown the chair through the French window, Uncle Roddy unbuttoning the jacket of his gray flannel suit and loosening his tie. He sat in one of the wing chairs.

  “The guy must be one of Cotton’s friends. No burglar takes time to light a fire.” He was breathing hard.

  “That’s possible,” I agreed. I pushed the curtain back so he could get some air.

  “I notice the Diamond broad qualified her statement about not seein’ the guy here before. That don’t mean she hasn’t seen him somewhere else.”

  “That’s possible.” I picked up the iron chair, and went through the broken window to put it back on the porch. Through the bushes I could see the patrol car leaving.

  “Sure she has,” he called to me. “I assume she’s been tailing Cotton for the past couple of weeks.”

  “That’s possible, too,” I said, coming back in. I started to push the other wing chair back to where it had been before I’d charged through the window.

  “ ‘That’s possible,’ “ he bellowed. “ ‘That’s possible.’ ‘I’m not free to tell you that,’ “ mimicking a little girl and screwing up his face trying to look sweet. “What the hell is going on here, Neal? Are you gonna sit down and talk to me or clean house the rest of the night?” His face was turning purple.

  I sat down fast. "Calm down, Uncle Roddy. Of course I’m going to talk to you.”

  Fonte came in through the front door with a smirk on his face.

  “What?” Uncle Roddy demanded. “You back from Touro already? You got a winged chariot or somethin’?”

  “I had Clift and Gaudet take her over,” Fonte said. “I figured I would be more help to you here.”

  This was undoubtedly a veiled reference to what a dangerous character I am. Phil Fonte hasn’t liked me much since I knocked his older brother’s nose out of joint after school one day. People in this town can’t forget something that happened twenty years ago because nothing changes in New Orleans. The same people you went to grammar school with still live down the block from you.

  A lot of air was rushing to get through Uncle Roddy’s nose. “All right, Fonte. Take a look at the broad’s car, will you?”

  “Done, Lieutenant. Nothin’ unusual.”

  Uncle Roddy gave up trying to get rid of little Phil. “You were sayin’, Neal?”

  “I was saying that the way things are shaping up, you’re probably right, Lieutenant"—I’ve been instructed not to be familiar with Uncle Roddy in front of subordinates—"that Lee Diamond was tailing Cotton. Cotton hired me to watch his wife. She got on a plane for Mexico City this evening.”

  Fonte laughed. “Doesn’t this beat everything, Lieutenant? The husband hires a dick and the wife hires a dick. These uptown richies can find the stupidest ways to spend money. Of course, it keeps the private dicks alive. What a scumbag way to make a living,” he said to me.

  “Fonte,” Uncle Roddy said, “how many times have I told you not to antagonize a witness?”

  “He didn’t see nothin’, Lieutenant.”

  “All right, Fonte. Why’d Cotton put a tail on his wife, Neal?”

  “He just said to watch her; he didn’t say why. The only thing he specified was that he didn’t want his law partners to know what was going on.”

  “Lawyers,” Fonte said. “Never have met one I liked.”

  Uncle Roddy and I both pretended we didn’t hear him.

  “Where is Cotton, Neal?”

  “I don’t know. I came over here to tell him that his wife left the country.”

  “Was she alone?” Fonte asked.

  Uncle Roddy nodded at me, so I said, “Yes.”

  “Well,” Uncle Roddy said, “my guess is it won’t matter worth a dime to us once we question Cotton. He’ll identify the bum victim, and there’ll be a major domestic crisis in the Cotton household. The D.A. won’t press charges against the Diamond woman and she won’t press charges against the burn victim. We’ll be out of it.” He meant the cops.

  I started to tell him it was possible, but caught myself in time. “I’m sure you’re right, Lieutenant.”

  He stood up and buttoned his jacket. He reminded me of a whale, the way he was dressed in all that gray flannel and blowing air through his nose. The blow this time, though, was amusement, not exasperation. The way you can tell is that his jowls shake and his big belly moves up and down.

  “Since you’re into cleaning your client’s house for him, Neal, we’ll le
ave the window detail to you,” he said and then left.

  It took me awhile to find everything I needed to board up the window. While I was hammering plywood and securing shutters, I had that uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. I kept looking up at the windows of the neighbors’ houses, but there was no one in any of them. I went back inside and waited until the fire was dead. Cotton still had not shown up, as I’d hoped, so I left him a note that his house had not been burgled, and to call me as soon as he got home, and to talk to me before he talked to the police. Those Good Samaritan acts saved my life.

  2

  * * *

  A Drink with Maurice

  The only car from which there was a view of Cotton’s front door was a brown Olds station wagon, three or four years old, parked across the street. There were a bunch of grocery bags in the back of it, and as I got closer I could see rolls of toilet paper, a box of Cheerios, a sack of dog food, that kind of stuff in the bags. On the back seat were some toys, on the front seat a box of Handi-Wipes. I looked again at the groceries. There wasn’t anything perishable that I could see in any of the bags. And Fonte had said there was nothing unusual. Well, I guess there wasn’t if all you thought about was that Lee Diamond is a woman. Uncle Roddy would have taken a second look. And then Uncle Roddy would have laughed at her cover.

  I went straight to Touro Infirmary, but she wasn’t there; she had never been admitted. I went to the emergency room first, then I double-checked at the front desk. No record at all of a Lee Diamond.

  It seemed best to stick close to Cotton’s house and hope he came home soon. I could wait at Maurice’s.

  Maurice and I have been friends since he was on the district attorney’s staff, where he started his career, and I was a rookie at the New Orleans Police Department. In the second phase of Maurice’s career, he went into private practice, a premeditated choice that was part of Maurice’s Big Game Plan. A few years later, I, too, went into private practice, but in no way was this move premeditated. I thought I would be a cop forever, straight on into retirement, just like my father and his father before him. Instead I met Myra Ledet.