“And I,” Juliet said. “I’m a noticer, too. In fact, I recognized it first. She wore it to the club’s open house at Christmas with a green dress. Red and green, it looked very Christmasy.”
“Are you telling this, Juliet, or am I?”
“You are, Cordelia.”
“Then let me proceed. We went to an auction last week and saw this necklace with a matching bracelet that was to be sold as a set. I wanted both, but there’s a limit on my charge card so I bought the necklace and Juliet bought the bracelet.”
“Wait a minute,” Ellen said. “Who wore it at the Christmas open house?”
“Mrs. Shaw,” Cordelia said.
“She looked very Christmasy,” Juliet said.
Ellen caught up with Aragon in the corridor. “Admiral Young’s daughters are here. They have some information which may or may not be accurate, but I think you should talk to them.”
The two girls were half hidden behind the door of Ellen’s office like children ready to pop out and say boo when a grownup came along. Aragon smiled at them in a friendly way but they didn’t respond.
“Why, it’s him,” Cordelia said. “The man who was staring at us this morning. Like in Singapore, that kind of stare.”
“Singapore? I’m sure you’re mistaken.” But Juliet glanced nervously around the room as though planning an escape if one proved necessary. Cordelia was very frequently right. “Why, this is our very own club and we’re just as safe here as—”
“Pops had two ensigns following us around Singapore, and what good did that do?”
Juliet couldn’t remember the ensigns and had only the vaguest recollection of ever being in Singapore, let alone of what had actually happened. But she was too sensible to admit this to Cordelia, who would merely take it as additional proof of Juliet’s inferiority.
“Stop this nonsense, girls,” Ellen said briskly. “I want you to tell Mr. Aragon what you told me.”
Cordelia came out from behind the door, her arms crossed on her chest in a defensive posture. “Why does he want to know?”
“He’s a lawyer.”
“We are not talking to any lawyer unless our lawyer is also present. Everybody who watches television knows that.”
“Oh, Cordelia,” Juliet said with a touch of sadness. “We don’t have a lawyer.”
“We’ll get one immediately.”
“Very well, you get one, but I refuse to pay for my half of him. He’ll be entirely on your charge card.”
“Wait a minute,” Aragon said. “We should be able to settle this quite simply. You hire me and I’ll waive the fee for my services.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m free.”
“Bull,” Cordelia said.
“No bull.”
“I never heard of a free lawyer.”
“There aren’t many of us around. Business is good but the pay’s lousy.”
“The arrangement seems rather loose, but it’s not costing us anything, so all right, you’re hired.”
Aragon congratulated himself. Not every young lawyer could afford to acquire in a single day such clients as the Admiral’s daughters and little Frederic Quinn. If the trend continued, it would be very handy, probably downright necessary, to have a working wife.
The girls had a whispered conference behind the door, punctuated by the clank of Juliet’s bracelets and the bronchial wheeze she developed when she became excited. Then Cordelia approached Aragon, licking her thin pale lips.
“No one could possibly connect us with Miranda Shaw’s disappearance. We didn’t get hold of her necklace and bracelet until a week ago when we spotted them at an auction. It wasn’t a regular auction, more of a small estate sale where the prices are set ahead of time. There’s this nice quiet young man who sells valuables other people want to get rid of for one reason or another.”
“We think he’s a fence,” Juliet said.
Cordelia silenced her sister with a jab in the ribs. “He seems to be a perfectly legitimate businessman who conducts auctions, the refined low-key kind. Most auctioneers are such screamers. Mr. Tannenbaum never raises his voice. Every now and then when we’re downtown we pop into his establishment to see what’s available.”
“Sometimes we buy, sometimes we spy,” Juliet said.
“We don’t actually spy, we just look around with our eyes wide open. I mean, you can never be sure, can you, Mr. Aragon?”
Aragon agreed that you could never be sure, at the same time feeling a twinge of sympathy for the unfortunate Tannenbaum. It was not an enviable fate, being the target of the girls’ suspicions, the recipient of their pop-ins, the focus of their wide-opens. He hoped the occasional sale recompensed Tannenbaum to some degree.
He said, “Was the jewelry expensive?”
“It’s crude to ask the price of things,” Cordelia reminded him.
“Yes. However—”
“A mark of ill-breeding.”
“Right. But I’d still like to know. It may be important.”
Juliet let out an anxious little wheeze. “You hear that, Cordelia? He said—”
“I heard him.”
“We’ve never done anything the least bit important in our whole lives.”
“Oh, we have so. We were born, weren’t we? And Mrs. Young’s often told us how much it changed her life. That’s important, changing someone’s life.”
“She didn’t mean it nice.”
“Important things aren’t necessarily nice.”
“I still don’t see what harm would come from answering the man’s question about the jewelry.”
“Mind your own business, sister.”
“It’s half my business,” Juliet said. “The bracelet was put on my charge card. If I want to tell someone what’s on my own charge card, I can. It’s a free country.”
“You shut up.”
“Fifteen hundred dollars. So there, ha ha! Fifteen hundred dollars.”
Tannenbaum’s place of business was on Estero Street in the lower part of the city. Two blocks to the east was the barrio where Aragon had been born and raised and gone to schools where English was in reality, if not in theory, a second language. The barrio was gradually filling up with the debris of poverty: pieces of abandoned cars, tires and doors and twisted bumpers, broken wine jugs and baby strollers, fallen branches of half-dead trees, disemboweled sofas and dismembered chairs.
Estero Street, at one time almost part of the barrio, had been salvaged by a downtown rehabilitation plan. Its two- and three-story redwood houses, built before the turn of the century, had been carefully restored and painted. Yards were tended, hedges clipped, lawns raked and clusters of birds-of-paradise and lilies-of-the-Nile bloomed under neat little windmill palms. The upper floors of the houses had been made into apartments, and the ground floors into small offices occupied by a travel agent, a chiropractor, a realtor, a bail bondsman, an attorney, an art dealer, a watch repairman.
In the window of what had once been somebody’s parlor was a small discreet sign: R. Tannenbaum, Estate Sales and Appraisals. An old-fashioned bell above the front door announced Aragon’s entrance. He found himself in a hall whose walls were hung with tapestries, some large enough to be used as rugs, some so small they were framed under glass. In a single spotlighted display case a collection of miniature musical instruments was arranged in a semicircle on a red velvet stage: a golden harp, an ivory grand piano, violins and cellos with silver strings fine as spider silk, trumpets and French horns carved from amethyst and woodwinds from tourmaline. No prices were shown. Tannenbaum’s merchandise — if the tapestries and miniatures were typical — was not that of an ordinary fence doing business in a small city like Santa Felicia. Fences gravitated south to Los Angeles and San Diego or north to San Francisco.