'She's in San Francisco.'
'She's where?'
I gave her a brief explanation, then listened as she relayed the information to Donna. 'Donna's quoting Yeats,' she told me. ' 'Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.' Even I can recognize that. Apt, though.
Things are falling apart all over the place.'
'I'm going to try to get hold of Chance.'
'Call me when you do?'
'I will.'
'Meanwhile Donna's staying here and we're not booking any tricks or answering the door. I already told the doorman not to let anybody come up.'
'Good.'
'I invited Fran to come over here but she said she didn't want to.
She sounded very stoned. I'm going to call her again and instead of inviting her to come over I'm going to tell her to come over.'
'Good idea.'
'Donna says the three little pigs will all be hiding in the brick house. Waiting for the wolf to come down the chimney. I wish she'd stick to Yeats.'
I couldn't get anywhere with his answering service. They were happy to take my message but wouldn't disclose whether Chance had called in recently. 'I expect to hear from him shortly,' a woman told me,
'and I will see that he receives your message.'
I called Brooklyn information and got the number for the house in Greenpoint. I dialed it and let it ring
for a dozen times. I'd remembered what he'd told me about removing the clappers from the bells of his telephones, but I thought it was worth a check.
I called Parke Bernet. The sale of African and Oceanic art and artifacts was scheduled for two o'clock.
I had a shower and a shave, had a roll and a cup of coffee and read the paper. The Post managed to keep the Motel Ripper on the front page, but it took some stretching to do it. A man in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx had stabbed his wife three times with a kitchen knife, then called the police to tell them what he'd done. This normally would have rated two paragraphs on the back page at the most, but the Post put it on the front page and topped it with a teaser headline that wondered, did the motel ripper inspire him?
I went to a meeting at twelve-thirty and got to Parke Bernet a few minutes after two. The auction was being held in a different room from the one where the sale lots had been displayed. You had to have a sale catalog to get a seat, and the catalogs cost five dollars. I explained I was just looking for someone and scanned the room. Chance wasn't there.
The attendant didn't want me to hang around unless I bought a catalog, and it was easier to do that than argue with him. I gave him the five dollars and wound up registering and getting a bidder's number while I was at it. I didn't want to register, I didn't want a bidder's number, I didn't want the goddamned catalog.
I sat there for almost two hours while one lot after another went under the hammer. By two-thirty I was fairly certain he wasn't going to show but I stayed in my seat because I couldn't think of anything better to do. I paid minimal attention to the auction and looked around every couple of minutes for Chance. At twenty to four the Benin bronze was offered for bids and sold for $65,000, which was just a little higher than the estimate. It was the star of the sale and quite a few bidders left once it had been sold. I hung on a few minutes longer, knowing he wasn't coming, just trying to grapple with the same thing I'd been grappling with for days.
It seemed to me that I already had all the pieces. It was just a question of fitting them together.
Kim. Kim's ring and Kim's mink jacket. Cojones. Maricon. The towels. The warning. Calderon. Cookie Blue.
I got up and left. I was crossing the lobby when a table full of catalogs of past sales caught my eye. I picked up a catalog of a jewelry auction held that spring and leafed through it. It didn't tell me anything. I put it back and asked the lobby attendant if the gallery had a resident expert on gems and jewelry. 'You want Mr. Hillquist,' he said, and told me what room to go to and pointed me in the right direction.
Mr. Hillquist sat at an uncluttered desk as if he'd been waiting all day for me to consult him. I gave him my name and told him I wanted some vague approximation of the value of an emerald. He asked if he could see the stone, and I explained that I didn't have it with me.
'You would have to bring it in,' he explained. 'The value of a gem depends upon so many variables.
Size, cut, color, brilliance—'
I put my hand in my pocket, touched the .32, felt around for the bit of green glass. 'It's about this size,' I said, and he fitted a jeweler's loupe into one eye and took the piece of glass from me. He looked at it, went absolutely rigid for an instant, then fixed his other eye warily upon me.
'This is not an emerald,' he said carefully. He might have been talking to a small child, or to a lunatic.
'I know that. It's a piece of glass.'
'Yes.'
'It's the approximate size of the stone I'm talking about. I'm a detective, I'm trying to get some idea of the value of a ring that has disappeared since I saw it, I—'
'Oh,' he said, and sighed. 'For a moment I thought—'
'I know what you thought.'
