"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."
27
Bernard Stark pushed the pile of coins away and stood again, walking to close the door of his office. "No good has befallen anyone who's come into contact with Farouk's treasures. It's quite surprising the government never knocked on your victim's door, demanding a full accounting."