The Kills

26

I was as captivated by the sparkling gold and silver coins in the window outside the entrance to the Stark brothers' offices as Holly Golightly had been while staring at the diamonds on show at Tiffany. Each was displayed against a deep blue velvet cushion, a setting that was more like a museum's than a retail operation's.

Mike was the last to arrive, and we announced ourselves to the receptionist in the waiting area. He took a quick inventory of the cases of coins. "Some piggy bank these boys have, huh?"

"You do anything useful today?" Mercer asked.

"Just a tidbit here and there. Spent a bit of time trying to figure out who might have smacked Miss Cooper here upside the shoulder last night."

"You check with the First Precinct to see if they've had other cases?" I asked.

Mike turned to Mercer. "I guess I'm just fortunate she doesn't stop by the apartment in the morning to make sure I put underwear on."

"And they haven't had anything like it?"

"There are a few hot spots downtown. But that area between the entrance to the ferry terminal and the promenade where all the buses stop is kept pretty well patrolled. Too many Wall Street high rollers to complain about bums and hustlers."

"You check on that Correction Department crew she's investigating?"

"We're getting information on all of them in the perp's team. What their work schedules are, and even though you can't make a facial ID, I want photos along with descriptions of their height and weight. Got one other piece of info."

"What's that?" Mercer asked.

"Throw in court officers. Guys in the area with blue uniform pants. Somebody who could have waited for Coop to leave the building, follow her to the church, and be waiting for a chance when she came outside."

"I've got no enemies in that department, I'd be willing to swear," I said, laughing. "My unit's probably responsible for more hours of overtime than any group of prosecutors in the office. And Laura bakes cookies for them every time I'm on trial."

"Well, your friend Etta Gatts? She's got a brother-in-law who's a court officer. Little Tiffany's favorite uncle, the brother of her late father."

"Criminal court?" I asked, racking my brain to think of an officer named Gatts.

"Uh-uh. Supreme Court, civil term. Sixty Centre Street."

"But I never-"

"She told you her people weren't through with you yet. Remember that moment?"

"Yeah, but Tiffany just called Will Nedim today. He thinks she's ready to roll over and give up Kevin Bessemer."

"Well, maybe her mama doesn't know that yet. Think of it, you had to walk directly past the front steps of his courthouse when you walked downtown last night."

"How could he know who I was?"

"Don't be naive, Coop. He could have been in the building with Etta Gatts the first day she came down here, after Tiffany was arrested. He's got the right uniform, the right ID-makes sense she would have called him to ask for help. Anybody could have pointed you out to him then. Might even have been the guy who slashed your tires that first night."

Mercer chimed in. "Motive, opportunity-"

"Pretty soon, the only joint it'll be safe for me to go is P. J. Bernstein's." My corner deli, fifty feet from the entrance to my building, was the best place for peace, quiet, and chicken noodle soup when I didn't want to stir far from home.

"Worst that can happen there is the latkes give you a little agita," Mike said.

"Mr. Stark will see you now," the receptionist said, pressing a button on her desk to open the first locked door leading to the offices. Once the three of us entered the small space, she buzzed again. The metal grating, like the kind in safe deposit vaults, swung open to admit us further, security cameras monitoring our progress.

Bernard Stark stood behind his desk, in front of a window that gave a sweeping view of Central Park crowned by a ceiling of rain clouds. He was in his late sixties, I thought, and seemed quite robust. He had thinning gray hair, a deep tan, a very warm smile, and was dressed in a nicely tailored suit.

"I've actually done a lot of work with the federal government, Mr. Wallace-the National Mint, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Treasury Department. It's not that often I'm called in to help you people. What can I do for you today?"

Mercer began the conversation. "We're struggling with an investigation. We thought maybe you could give us a little guidance, before we take a wrong turn and get too far off the scent."

"We're quite willing to pay for your time, your expertise, Mr. Stark," I added.

"Let me get an idea of what you need. Perhaps I can just point you in the right direction." He winked at me. "I don't charge for that."

"I'm afraid there isn't that much to tell right now," Mercer said. "We're trying to solve a murder case. It appears that someone-or maybe several people-thought the deceased had some property of significant worth."

"Was this person a collector?" Stark asked. "Is that why you've come to me?"

"No, she wasn't a collector. We found a few things of some value in her home, but they were gifts given to her many years ago."

"I see. Was she from a prominent family? Perhaps someone who was a client of my firm, or an obituary I read about in the newspaper."

Not unless you subscribe to the Amsterdam News, I thought to myself. "No, her murder didn't even merit a mention."

Mercer reached into his pocket and took out one of his plastic evidence bags, which he had labeled with information about where and when he had retrieved its contents. He handed the package to Bernard Stark.

"May I empty this onto my desk to look them over?"

"Certainly."

Stark turned the bag upside down and gently slid the twenty coins onto his exquisitely tooled leather blotter. He spread them out with his forefinger, moving them around like checkers on a board, ordering them by size and color.

"What do you see?" Mike asked.

The dealer was slow to speak. "Most of these have some age on them. That's obvious from their dates."

"But their value," the impatient detective asked, "are they worth anything?"

"These over here," he said, pointing to a series of small coins that all appeared to be the same. "They're just proofs. Never actually put into circulation. Three-cent nickels are what they're called."

"Can you give me an idea of what they'd bring in at an auction?" Mike asked.

"This group, dated 1871, you might get a hundred dollars for each of them. Those from a decade later, maybe two hundred."

Not exactly a king's ransom, but then we'd each had cases in which people had been murdered for pocket change, or for parking in the wrong space on the street.

Mercer removed another bag of coins from his pocket.

"Ah," Stark said, taking a jeweler's loop out of his drawer and holding it up to his eye.

"I see you've got some foreign pieces, too. Romania, Sweden, Greece-none terribly valuable, but certainly interesting. You say these belonged to an amateur, not a collector?"

I didn't need to tell him they were the property of a thief who had pilfered from a world-class collector. Bernard Stark was already intrigued.

"My impression is that the deceased…well," I stalled momentarily, "she sort of inherited some of these from an old friend. Something like that, but we're not entirely sure yet."

"Someone had a good eye here, Ms. Cooper. Transylvania, 1764."

The three of us leaned in to look at the piece he was holding up to us.

"A two-ducat piece. Last time I saw something like this," he said, "it went for almost a thousand dollars."

Most of the local bodegas in Queenie's neighborhood didn't deal in two-ducat Transylvanian coins. She probably hadn't been able to tip her errand boys with it.

"No offense, Mr. Stark, but can you tell just by eyeballing these things that they're real?" Mike asked.

"You're not going to cut in on my business, are you, Detective?" the older man said, laughing. "That's why people come to me with their gold and silver. That's what I do, Mr. Chapman, the way you solve crime. And if my eye isn't good enough, there are, of course, ways to prove the contents of the coins."

We watched him handle each piece, turning it over and examining both sides.

"See this little fellow?" Stark asked. He seemed delighted to be poring over the dregs of Queenie's purloined collection. "Quite unusual. Don't come across these very often."

"What is it?" Mike asked.

"An 1844 dime. But Liberty's seated in this one. It's got its nice natural silver surface with what we like to call champagne toning. Come, come, Mr. Wallace-any more bags?"

Mercer handed over the third plastic envelope. This one had several more proofs of little value, and then Stark's broad smile reappeared as he lifted a large silver medallion and studied its pale green patina. "Very choice, this. Very, very choice. Look at the date on this beauty."

He held out the coin in his hand for each of us to study. The Latin inscription on the top border translated as "American Liberty." "July Fourth, 1776," I said.

Mike kept looking for the bottom line. "It doesn't have any number on it. What kind of coin is it?"

"It's a medal, actually, not a coin. On the rear you see the infant Hercules-that's the symbol for the American colonies-defending himself against the cowardly British leopard. Can you read the Latin on the back?"

"Sorry, no."

"'Not without divine aid is the infant bold.' From the Roman poet Horace," Stark said. "One of these silver medals was given to every member of the Continental Congress after the battles of Saratoga and Yorktown."

Now Mike was thoroughly engaged. Warfare did it for him every time. "You've seen these before?"

"Very few exist, Mr. Chapman. It was quite a magnificent strike, but small in quantity."

"What would you expect to get for it on the street?"

"Wrong question, Detective. It's got no street value at all-that's my point. It wasn't issued as a coin. But it's got major value in the auction market. The last of these fetched many thousands of dollars."

Stark's secretary entered the room with a large tray. It was decoupaged, covered with coins of every size and color. On it she carried a coffeepot and an assortment of sodas.

We each helped ourselves to something to drink.

Stark held his cup and saucer, standing at the window now as rain slapped against it. "I don't mind giving you a hand with whatever you're doing, but I hope you plan to let me in on your little secret."

"Secret?" Mike asked.

"My family has been in this business for almost a century, and we know where most of the rarest coins in the world have been bought and sold over the years. The minute you walk out my door," Stark said, "I can check our records for Libertas Americana and probably figure out where this very piece has been hiding for the past half century."

I wasn't planning to test him, but Queenie had been holding on to it for longer than that.

"I can be much more useful to you if I know what I'm dealing with," Stark went on, turning his back to stare out at the view, and giving us the opportunity to signal each other in agreement. I nodded at Mike-Queenie's homicide was his case.

"We don't know what we should be looking for, Mr. Stark. We don't know what the bad guys were looking for, either, and we have no idea whether they've found it. The woman who died," he said, after some deliberation, "was an eighty-two-year-old invalid who lived alone in an apartment in Harlem."

"With these coins? Unsecured, in her home?"

"Strewn about the floor of her closet and overlooked by whoever burglarized her place-and that person may, or may not, have been her killer."

Mike paused before going on. "Nobody would have known it to see her now, but back when she was a kid, my victim had an affair with one of the richest men in the world. He was the collector-he was the one she got these babies from," he said, playing the coins back and forth on the green blotter.

Stark was ready for the chase. He sat down at his desk and swiveled his chair to face his computer screen. "I'm sure I can check him in our database. There hasn't been an American in this game-auctions or private acquisitions-since the Starks have been in business that didn't get some of his coins from us."

"That's part of the problem," Mike said. "This guy wasn't here in the States. He wasn't American."

Mike looked to Mercer one more time, and got the nod to tell the dealer. "In fact, he was the King of Egypt."

Bernard Stark pushed back from the keyboard and looked Mike Chapman in the eye. "This woman kept part of Farouk's collection in her bedroom closet? I'm not the least bit surprised that she's dead."