Carnal Curiosity - Stuart Woods Page 0,41

to her about any of this?”

“It seems premature. Kate doesn’t even have the nomination yet, and Ann and I are just getting started.”

“I think you need to live in the future a little, like you said. You don’t want all this to fall on you when you haven’t thought about it, planned for it.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it. If you’ll think about being commissioner.”

“You got yourself a deal, pal. Maybe we can still improve our lot in life!”

33

Jack Coulter received Stone in a handsome sitting room at the Brook. It was an old club, and one of the few that had managed to stay all-male. He wondered how they had managed that under city law. The mayor had had to resign from the club when he ran for the office.

“How are you, Stone?”

“I’m very well, Jack, and you?”

“Better every day.”

“We had a very interesting evening with you last week.”

“A little too interesting, I think. Shall we go in?”

Stone followed Jack to the dining room, and they were seated and ordered lunch.

“Something I’ve wanted to talk to you about,” Jack said. He looked uncomfortable for a moment, then sighed. “You and I have met before, you know. Last year.”

“That was something that hadn’t crossed my mind until yesterday, when it was mentioned to me.”

“It was the detective, wasn’t it? O’Brien?”

“Is that his name?”

“He arrested me once, twenty-five years ago, but he couldn’t make it stick. He has a long memory.”

“I’m impressed, Jack. How have you managed this transformation? I never twigged, until Dino brought it up. His detective had mentioned it to him.”

“I’ve always been a good mimic,” Jack said. “You should hear my Jimmy Stewart.”

Stone laughed.

“I was living at the Breakers, in Palm Beach, when I met Hillary and her brother, Winston, and his wife. Before I knew it, I was talking and behaving like them. After a little of that, I managed to fit in. Then Hillary and I fell in love, and here we are.”

“And a member of the Brook, too!”

“Winston engineered that. He’s very much an insider here. There’s no formal admission process—one day you get an invitation, and that’s it.”

“Saves a lot of letter writing, I guess.”

“Stone, I’m concerned about this thing with the detective. He thinks, naturally enough, that with my background I might have some connection to the robbers. I don’t. A couple of decades’ separation from that life, and when you get back, everybody is either dead or in prison.”

“Dino and I had this conversation yesterday, and I think I convinced him that you weren’t involved.”

“Well, it’s a relief to hear that.”

“I’m glad I could be of help.”

Lunch arrived, and they tucked in.

“It occurs to me,” Jack said, “that I might be helpful in this matter, but I don’t want to become directly involved, for obvious reasons.”

“I understand.”

“In thinking about the robbery, I remembered that I once knew a very smart fence. His name is Jacob Sutton—born Schwartz, I think. He had—probably still has—one of those stalls in the diamond market, over in the West Forties.”

“I know the place.”

“In a robbery like the one at our place, it would be smart to get the proceeds out of the country quickly—remove the stones and ship them, then melt down the gold and platinum. But Jake worked another way. He’d remove the stones, sometimes recut the larger ones, reset them, retail what he could and sell the rest to the trade. He’d get double what he would have gotten in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv, but it took patience, something most criminals don’t seem to have much of. Everybody wants to get paid now, you know?”

“That’s very interesting. Is Jake known to the police?”

“When I knew him, he had never once been arrested. He was a pillar of the Hasidic community in Brooklyn and something of a philanthropist. He worked his stall every day. Everybody knew him, trusted him.”

“I’ll see that he’s looked into.”

“Something else: we recently had our security system updated. We were having a lot of false alarms with the old equipment, and on the recommendation of our insurers, it was replaced by a man named Dugan. I mentioned this to the detectives.”

“Between you and me, Don Dugan is a prime suspect,” Stone said. “Believe me, no stone will be left unturned where he’s concerned.”

“I’m glad to hear that, and I’d like to know what comes of the investigation.”

“I understand that one of your dinner guests had his own home robbed.”

“Robert Quincy,” Jack said. “I talked to him yesterday. He had no connection with