Family Jewels

50

Stone had dinner with Dino at Rotisserie Georgette, an East Side favorite of his that specialized in French comfort food. Viv was out of town on business.

“The Times reviewer said that the clock in this place stopped at ten minutes before cuisine nouvelle,” Stone remembered.

“That’s good enough for me,” Dino said, and they split a roast chicken between them.

“Okay, what happened after I left you at the Lowell?”

“Turns out that David and Alexandra, as they then were, ducked into the restaurant next door through the hotel lobby entrance, and the doorman there put them into a cab. We missed them by a whisker, and those New York yellow cabs have a way of all looking alike.”

“Did you shoot any of your entourage?”

“Nah, it wasn’t their fault, it was yours, for not figuring that trick with the door.”

“I assume you exercised your rights under the search warrant?”

“I did. We took the suite apart, but there was nothing there but clothes and the sort of things people travel with.”

“No fake IDs or paperwork of any kind?”

“You tell me — was the guy carrying a briefcase when they got on the elevator with us?”

“Jesus, I think you’re right. I forgot about that.”

“Then that’s where the goodies were. I’d give a lot to rummage through that briefcase.”

“Would you like me to do my magic trick and find out if they’ve checked into another hotel?”

“You mean get Bob Cantor to use his ill-gotten computer program?”

“I did not say that.”

“Did you know that in France, when anyone checks into a hotel, a little card is filled out, and those are collected every evening by the local cop shop, and all the names entered into their computer?”

“I did know that, but I’d forgotten it. You should buy Bob’s computer program, you know.”

“We would, if he hadn’t stolen parts of it from half a dozen other pieces of copyrighted software. He’d have to rewrite all the code from scratch before we’d touch it, and that could take months, if not years.”

“It might be worth the wait,” Stone pointed out.

“But to get back to the subject at hand. I don’t think D and A are in a hotel, I think they’ve got a little hidey-hole somewhere in the city, probably not far from the Lowell and the Carlyle, where they keep their wardrobe and the tools of their trade — computer, cameras, color copying machine, laminator, et cetera, plus checkbooks, letters of credit, and all the other paraphernalia that the modern con artiste employs.”

“I would have thought they’d be out of town by now.”

“Nah, we did some digging and found traces of them here and there. They’re supremely confident, those two. Did you notice how cool D was when you introduced me? And believe me, they had already planned an escape route out of that hotel or they wouldn’t have been staying there. It was like they went up in a puff of smoke.”

“So what’s your next move?”

“I don’t have one,” Dino admitted, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if we heard from them again. By ‘we’ I mean ‘you.’”

“Why would they contact me?”

“To gloat, maybe.”

“You think they’re that cocky?”

“Oh, hell yes. I expect they’ve made a very nice living, maybe a fortune, out of what they do, and they admire themselves.”

“That reminds me — I had a call from my New Mexico sheriff. He checked with the hotel, and they used a credit card there with no customer or bank name on it, just a number and the usual strip of magnetic tape.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“They’ve got an offshore bank account — maybe in the Cayman Islands, maybe more than one place. They can wire-transfer funds into it from anywhere, and they can use the anonymous card to get cash at ATMs, or use it at hotels, rental car agencies, and like that.”

“That sounds pretty smooth,” Dino said. “I’d like to have one of those.”

“All you need is a ticket to the Bahamas, where you charter a light airplane to fly you to George Town, Caymans — and enough cash in your bag to impress a banker. You need never visit the bank again.”

“How long do you suppose they’ve been doing this work?”

“They’re in their late forties, early fifties, I’d say, and I’ll bet that at least one of them has worked in a bank or on Wall Street. They’d need that kind of experience to work their scams.”

“Did they take Carrie Fiske for any money?”

“I think they had planned to, but once they got a whiff of her jewelry collection, they probably ditched the long con they usually run and went for the ice. But they got greedy and impatient and killed the golden goose.”

“And what do you think they’re doing now?”

“Looking for another goose.”