“Yep, and it’s the job. Might as well make your peace with it now, save you a lot of heartache in the future. Don’t worry, you won’t end up like me.” She grinned, a hint, indeed, of Loretta Young in the sparkle of her dark eyes. “You don’t smoke.”
Jeremiah reined in any impulse to argue with her. He was not like Helen Samuel. He would never be like Helen Samuel. Thirty years from now, he would not be sitting behind a crummy desk in a crummy office talking Gold Coast gossip with a young investigative reporter. He would be…what? He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. But damned if he’d be an aging, chain-smoking, cynical gossip columnist with a warped sense of humor.
“If you don’t object,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you know about this jewel thief.”
“Know? I don’t know shit. But I’ve heard a few things.”
She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and fumbled for a lighter as ancient as she was. Jeremiah waited impatiently. When she had the cigarette lit and had taken a deep drag and blown what smoke didn’t get sucked into her lungs into his air space and still didn’t go on, he groaned. “Helen, if you’re going to make me beg for every word…”
“Beg? You, Tabak? Wait, lemme get a photographer in here. We’ll print it on page one.”
He glared at her.
She waved her cigarette at him, ash flicking off onto her blotter. “Oh, you love it. Playing the big, bad reporter. Anybody who hasn’t been around as long as I have is scared shitless of you. Which means everyone else in the goddamned building. Okay, here’s the poop.” She laid her cigarette on her ashtray, getting down to business. “So this little bastard’s hit eight, ten times in the last couple weeks.”
“Seven times in fourteen days, including last night at the Greenaway.”
“Yeah, whatever. Facts are your department.” She grinned, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “Okay. At first, nobody thinks anything. Maybe it’s robbery, or maybe it’s some daffy socialite who forgot to put on her jewels and would rather cry cat burglar than admit it, or maybe it’s an insurance scam. You know, all these baubles are insured. Pretty convenient, if not suspicious, that none of the victims has been hurt or has seen a thing.”
“No witnesses?”
“Nope. None that are talking, anyway. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth hit that people starting admitting they’ve got a problem on their hands.”
“The police?”
“They’re investigating. The different departments involved are coordinating. I mean, that’s what I hear. I make a practice of not talking to the police if I can help it. But the modus operandi for each hit is the same—the guy strikes at parties, not sneaking into an unoccupied home or hotel room like your typical cat burglar, and takes advantage of the least little mistake. I guess people are regarding him as a cat burglar because he hasn’t been seen—he’s not sticking people up, just slipping into their pockets and handbags unnoticed.”
“Bold,” Jeremiah said.
“And observant as hell.”
“So he must be in a position to watch the crowd without drawing attention.”
“He or she,” Helen amended pointedly.
“You think it’s a woman?”
She shrugged, plucking her cigarette from its position on her ashtray, taking a quick drag, and replacing it again, a half-inch of ash dropping into the mound. “Something about this jewel thief’s different. Maybe it’s gender, I don’t know. You were at the Greenaway last night?”
He nodded.
Helen rocked back in her chair, thinking. Jeremiah could imagine her applying her decades of experience with people, with the Gold Coast, with a world, he thought, with which he was largely unfamiliar. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a socialite wearing a diamond-encrusted salamander brooch. She notices the clasp is loose and tucks it into the pocket of her Armani jacket and forgets about it. When it gets a little warm, she takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of her chair. Later in the evening, she puts the jacket on, remembers the brooch, dips her hand into her pocket, and, lo and behold, it’s gone. She gets security, they search everywhere, but no salamander.”
“That doesn’t mean it was stolen.”
“Two weeks ago, probably no one would have thought a thing of it. Now, it fits the pattern.”
“How much was the brooch worth?”
“Thirty grand. It’s covered by insurance.”
“Has anyone else come forward who lost jewelry before the last two weeks and now thinks it might have been the work of our thief?”
Helen shook her head, iron-gray wisps dripping out of the mass of bobby pins she used to keep her hair up. “Not yet.”
Jeremiah ran the slim set of facts through his mind. “People scared?”
“Not enough to leave their good stuff in the vault.”
“Have the police landed on any common denominators?”
“Not that they’ve shared with me.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly, and she leaned across her cluttered desk. “Why? Have you?”