“K.P.?”
“Whatever.”
“I am interested in just how totally loyal she was to Mr. Laneer.”
“There are no words for it, Mr. Rhoades. People have to give themselves to someone or something, don’t you think? We all have a terrible need to be needed and necessary. I don’t mean to imply there was ever anything emotional or sexual about Anne’s relationship to Trevor Laneer. She just wanted to be so diligent, so thorough, so knowledgeable that the business could not survive without her. And the more indispensable she became, the more she cherished her job. It was more than a job to her. It was a dedication.”
“OK. Suppose Laneer said to her, ‘Miss Farley, for the good of the business, I want you to strip, paint yourself blue, and go live in a tree like a Druid. I don’t want you to ask me why. Just do it. I am depending on you.’ How would she respond?”
“Twenty minutes later, she’d be blue and living in a tree.”
“And if he asked her to steal from the business to save the business?”
Her smile disappeared at once. She frowned and bit her thumb knuckle. “I think I see where you’re trying to go. Say it.”
“Let’s say the business doesn’t go too well. So J. Trevor starts quietly turning good stuff into junk, selling the good stuff, and putting the money back in. After he has converted thirty-two pieces, he tells her to go away on a long, long trip. He accuses her of robbing him and collects from Equity Protection.”
She shook her head slowly. “The business has been doing very well. Much better now than in the old location. I know gems. I have a good eye and good training. I would bet my life those good pieces were there a few days before he went to Chicago.”
“Try it another way, then. Maybe it was women or gambling. But he dropped a lot, took it out of the business, and had to replace it.”
“That won’t work either. The person who keeps the books is very competent. And we are audited frequently by the bank. It’s a headache, the way we have to take inventory so often.”
“Why by the bank?”
“I don’t know, really. It has something to do with the Trust Department. The Wescotts are a wealthy family and there were a lot of trusts set up and the store is in one of the trusts, I think.”
“How about J. Trevor’s bad habits?”
“Mr. Rhoades, Mr. Laneer is absolutely devoted to his poor wife. She had a terrible stroke, you know? She is absolutely unable to communicate in any way. He spends his free time at home with her, in that lovely old house. His only vice, if you could call it that, is working so hard on that big rock garden he built where she can see it from her bedroom window. It is really something. Waterfalls and boulders and exotic plants and trees and fish ponds and all, and even floodlights at night. A couple of times he’s given himself a bad back working so hard. I suppose it is because it takes his mind off... her helplessness.”
“He dresses like a secret swinger.”
“I know. But he sells a lot of diamonds to a lot of ladies and gets along with them beautifully, and that is as far as it goes.”
“And there is a lot of money?”
She closed her eyes for an instant, expression beatific, then said, “Gross ugly wads of it. Cellars full of it.”
OK. So scrap another set of assumptions, Duke. Try again.
I spent a part of Saturday afternoon in the small, walled sun yard behind Libby’s townhouse apartment. Fido stalked imaginary monsters. Libby, in string bikini, atop a picnic table, asprawl on a huge towel imprinted to resemble a thousand-dollar bill, worked on her tan and complained about mine. I carried empties into the apartment and brought new beers back out.
After I had walked around and around the table, reciting my doubts, suspicions, and inadequacies, she said in a sun-dazed mumble, “How’n hell’d she plan so far ahead?”
“You mean making the hotel and air reservations in October? Well, everybody says she was a very orderly person and...”
I stopped. “Hm,” I said. “How orderly do you have to be to know you are going to be able to heist all those stones on a Friday when you didn’t know whether Laneer would be there or not? Damn it, he told her a week or so ahead of time he was going to that auction in Chicago to bid on the yellow diamond. And that’s when she asked if she could start her vacation. Vacation in November?”
“He owed her a week, Duke. She took just two weeks last summer. He owed her another week.”
“But she had the reservations all made before she asked!”
“She could be pretty sure he’d say OK.”
“Do you think she could have managed the switch anyway? I mean, even if Laneer hadn’t gone to Chicago?”
“I suppose so. It wouldn’t have been easy, though. It would have been more risky.”
“So she had the date all picked,” I said, “and his going away was just a lucky accident.”
“So why didn’t she set the date for the other week of her vacation earlier?” Libby asked. “From what they found out about what she’d been doing, she was already moved out of her apartment by the time she asked for that week.”
“Maybe she asked for it a lot earlier,” I said. “Would the other women have known?”
“No. She didn’t talk about things like that to us. She was always — you know — distant. Are you saying Mr. Laneer lied about it?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. The timing is all screwed up. She had to start planning the robbery months and months before it happened. She had to get thirty-two fake pieces made, smuggling out the photographs and specifications and smuggling them back in again. Careful, careful long-term planning. Very smart in the beginning, and very stupid toward the end.”
“So how should she have done it, Investigator Rhoades?”
“Don’t needle me. She’s gone and the diamonds are gone, so it had to be a pretty good job. I keep wanting to tie J. Trevor Laneer into it. But facts and instinct say no. I have seen so many people react to so many different things, I can tell when I’m being conned. Laneer’s reaction when I first saw him was exactly right. It wasn’t overdone or underdone. He had the settlement. He’d told everything he knew so many times he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. And the reaction was exactly right the second time too. Remorse, apology — not too much or too little. You know, Lib honey, I like the guy. He is OK.”
“Duke, I told you the first time we talked that Laneer is one cruel, mean person.”
“Come on!”
“I really mean it.” She rolled up onto her elbow and squinted at me through the hot yellow sunlight. “Lots of people complain about their boss. It isn’t like that. He’s really a bastard. He goes out of his way to do mean things. A long time ago, when I was about twelve, my parents took me and my brother to see him in a play, at Halloween time. It was supposed to be for kids. He was an evil wizard and he scared me so bad I had nightmares for a week.”
“In a play?” I said wonderingly.
“Oh, yes, he was very big around town in the Peachtree Playhouse Amateur Theatre, but they have a professional director and a big budget, and they do good things. He quit about seven or eight years ago, I think, when his wife had that stroke. He’s an actor, Duke. He can make people like him. They say that’s how he snared Betty Wescott. She was getting some family jewelry repaired — that was after her divorce — and it must have been twenty-five years ago, and he was the one in the Piedmont store, the old store, who was doing the bench work at that time, and she wanted to explain exactly what she wanted done. At least, that’s what they say. She’s older than he, by ten years I guess. Because he didn’t have... the breeding or the advantages, they never had much to do with the social stuff before her stroke. Just the little theatre is all.”