Yeah, Roarke was a guy who came in handy. “Okay, so you know what you know. Her grandfather recovered or helped recover the stones they got back.”
“Yes. And her great-grandfather—mother’s side—was one of the team who stole them.”
“Is that so?” She leaned back, considered. “We didn’t get into that end.”
“It’s in the book. She doesn’t hide the connection. In fact, the connections, the ins and outs, are strong selling points.”
“Give me the highlights.”
“There were four known members of the heist team. One was an inside man, who handled the switch. The others posed as clients or part of the investigative team after the diamonds were discovered missing. Each scheduled a meeting with one of the designers or wholesalers upstairs. Each picked up a novelty item planted by the inside man. A ceramic dog, a rag doll, and so on.”
“Back up. A doll?”
“Hide in plain sight,” he explained. “Innocuously. In each blind was a quarter share of the take. They walked in, walked out in broad daylight. Legend has it—and Samantha Gannon perpetuates this in her book—that two of them had lunch a block or so away with their share on their person.”
“They just walked out.”
“Brilliant in its simplicity, really. There’s a retail section, street level. Almost a bazaar. And in those days—still in these from time to time—some of the jewelers walk from store to store, from shop to shop, carrying a fortune in gems tucked into paper cups they call briefkes. With enough balls, data and some inside assistance, it’s easier than you might think to walk off with sparkles in the daylight. Easier by far than an after-hours job. Do you want coffee?”
“Are you getting it?”
“I will.” He rose to go into the kitchen. “They’d never have gotten away with it,” he called out. “There are careful records kept for stones of that sort. It would take a great deal of patience and willpower to wait until enough time had passed to turn them, and careful research and a strong sense of character to select the right source for that liquidation. Human nature being human nature, they were bound to get nipped.”
“They got away with a chunk.”
“Not exactly.” He came back in with a pot and two cups. “Things went wrong almost immediately, starting with dishonor among thieves—as there invariably is. One of the lot, who went by the name of Crew, decided why take a quarter when you can take all. He was a different sort than O’Hara—that’s the great-grandfather—and the others, and they should’ve known better than to throw in with him. He lured the inside man—probably promising a sweeter deal. He gave him two bullets in the brain. They used bullets with alarming regularity back then. He took his dead partner’s share, and so had half.”
“And went after the others.”
“He did. News traveled, and they rabbited before he got to them. And that’s how they ended up bringing O’Hara’s daughter into it. It got messy, as you’ll see when you read the book yourself. Another of them was killed. Both Crew and the insurance cop sniffed out the trail. The cop and the thief’s daughter fell in love, happily enough, and she helped him with the recovery of the half O’Hara had access to. Though they rounded up Crew as well, with some drama and heroics, he was killed in prison less than three years after his term began. They found his original share tucked away in a safe-deposit box here in the city, tracked from a key he had on his person at the time of arrest. But he never revealed where the other portion of the diamonds was.”
“More than fifty years ago. They could be long gone by now. Right back in some jewelry case in the form of rings, bracelets, whatever.”
“Certainly. But it’s more fun to imagine them hidden inside some ceramic cat getting dusty on a shelf in a thrift store, isn’t it?”
The fun didn’t register with her, but the motive did. “She talks about the family connection in her book, missing diamonds. Sexy stuff. Somebody’s going to decide she must have them, or know where they are.”
“There’s a disclaimer in the book, of course. But yes, some are bound to wonder if she or someone in her family has them. If they’re still out there, and unset, they’d be worth a great deal more today than they were at the beginning of the century. The legend alone bumps the value.”