Colombian emeralds. Real quality stuff.'
'Matt, would you please tell me why in the hell you're telling me all this?'
'It makes an interesting story.'
'You're not just telling me, you're telling the whole room. Do you know what you're doing?'
I looked at him.
'Okay,' he said, after a moment. 'Bryna, pay attention, darling.
The crazy man wants to talk about emeralds.'
'Kim's boyfriend was going to be the middleman, handling the sale of the emeralds for the men who'd brought them into the country. He did this sort of thing before, made a few dollars for himself. But now he was in love with an expensive lady and he had a reason to want some real money. So he tried a cross.'
'How?'
'I don't know. Maybe he switched some stones. Maybe he held out. Maybe he decided to grab the whole bundle and run with it. He must have told Kim something because on the strength of it she told Chance she wanted out. She wasn't going to be turning tricks anymore.
If I were going to guess, I'd say he did a switch and went out of the country to unload the good stuff. Kim got herself free of Chance while he was gone, and when he got back it was going to be Happily Ever After time. But he never came back.'
'If he never came back, who killed her?'
'The people he crossed. They decoyed her to that room at the Galaxy Downtowner. She probably thought she was going to be meeting him there. She wasn't hooking anymore, she wouldn't have gone to a hotel room to meet a john. In fact she'd never been much on hotel tricks.
But suppose she gets a call from somebody who says he's a friend and the boyfriend's afraid to come to her place because he thinks he's being followed, so would she please meet him at the hotel?'
'And she went.'
'Sure she went. She got all dressed up, she wore the presents he gave her, the mink jacket and the emerald ring. The jacket wasn't worth a fortune because the guy wasn't rich, he didn't have money to burn, but he could give her a terrific emerald because the emeralds didn't cost him anything. He was in the business, he could take one of those smuggled stones and have it set in a ring for her.'
'So she went over and got killed.'
'Right.'
Danny Boy drank some vodka. 'Why? You figure they killed her to get the ring back?'
'No. They killed her to kill her.'
'Why?'
'Because they were Colombians,' I said, 'and that's how they do it. When they have a reason to hit somebody they go for the whole family.'
'Jesus.'
'Maybe they figure it's a deterrent,' I said. 'I could see where it might be. The cases make the papers pretty regularly, especially in Miami. A whole family gets waxed because somebody burned somebody else in a coke deal. Colombia's a rich little country. They've got the best coffee, the best marijuana, the best cocaine.'
'And the best emeralds?'
'That's right. Kim's jeweler wasn't a married guy. I figured he was, that's why he was so hard to get a line on, but he never married. Maybe he never fell in love until he fell in love with Kim, and maybe that's why he was ready to kick his life over. Anyway, he was a bachelor. No wife, no kids, no living parents.
You want to rub out his family, what do you do? You kill his girlfriend.'
Bryna's face was as white as her hair now. She didn't like stories where they killed the girlfriend.
'The killing was pretty professional,' I went on, 'in that the killer was careful about evidence. He covered his tracks pretty well. But something made him do a butcher job instead of a couple of quick bullets from a silenced handgun. Maybe he had a thing about prostitutes, or maybe it was women in general. One way or another, he went and did a number on Kim.
'Then he cleaned up, packed the dirty towels along with the machete, and got out of there. He left the fur jacket and he left the money in the purse but he took her ring.'
'Because it was worth so much money?'
'Possibly. There's no hard evidence on the ring, and for all I know it was cut glass and she bought it for herself. But it might have been an emerald, and even if it wasn't the killer might have thought it was. It's one thing to leave a few hundred dollars on a dead body to show you don't rob the dead. It's something else to leave an emerald that might be worth fifty thousand dollars, especially if it's your emerald in the first place.'
'I follow you.'
'The room clerk at the Galaxy Downtowner was a Colombian, a young kid named Octavio Calderon.
Maybe that was a coincidence. There are a lot of Colombians in town these days. Maybe the killer picked the Galaxy because he knew somebody who worked there. It doesn't matter. Calderon probably recognized the killer, or at least knew enough about him to keep his mouth shut. When a cop came back to have another talk with him, Calderon disappeared. Either the killer's friends told him to disappear or Calderon decided he'd be safer somewhere else. Back home in Cartagena, say, or another rooming house in another part of Queens.'
