Montaro Caine A Novel - By Sidney Poitier Page 0,51

no one acted upon it. Now that that someone is no longer with us, it was recently brought to my attention. Frankly, I thought the discovery you made that morning was much more than just a wonderful human-interest story. I think the object should be a part of our exhibit. Something that might, in time, prove useful for history and science. It should be properly preserved.”

From the silence at the other end of the line, Cordiss sensed Pittman’s anxiousness. She continued to reassure the woman before she pushed her luck.

“Do you still have the coin?” she asked.

The old woman hesitated before answering. “Yes, yes, I think I do have it somewhere.”

Cordiss gulped, but quickly pressed on. “We would be willing to purchase it from you for a reasonable sum.”

“You want to buy it?”

“Yes, if you agree.” The thought had never occurred to her that she would find the coin so quickly, and she hadn’t considered what sum to offer. “Ten thousand dollars,” Cordiss stated.

There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” the elderly woman finally said. “I’ll have to think about it and talk about it with my sister. I don’t know right now.”

The change in the old woman’s voice told Cordiss she should let things rest for a while. “All right, you think about it, and I’ll call you again in a couple of weeks.”

Cordiss was ecstatic when she hung up the phone. The coin existed, and aside from the old woman, she was the only one who knew. Mozelle didn’t know. Anna Hilburn didn’t know. It appeared that Franklyn Walker didn’t even know. Her plan might just work.

While she waited patiently for her next conversation with Pittman, Cordiss force-fed herself a diet of information about rare art collectors. She was coached by her streetwise boyfriend of five years, Victor Lambert, who was a product of Hell’s Kitchen, where even now, survival depended, more often than not, on highly honed instincts and the ability, so said Victor, to “piss ice water.”

With Victor’s help, Cordiss selected as their first choice a man named Roland Gabler. Unlike some of the other top collectors, Gabler had not been born into wealth. A native of Needles, Nebraska, he had worked at the Brixton Hardware Store throughout his teenage years. He had charmed and manipulated store owner Ed Brixton to such an extent that the man had remembered Gabler in his will, which had provided Gabler with the money to put himself through Columbia University. Cordiss had recognized something of Victor’s and her own stories and backgrounds in Gabler’s biography and thought he might be a man with whom they could do business.

When she finally succeeded in getting Gabler on the phone, she calmly let drop the information that she had access to an item so rare that it would, unquestionably, be the number one prize in the entire world for the collector lucky enough to possess it.

Of course, Roland Gabler had heard such talk before, hundreds of times, in fact; but on the off chance that one in a thousand such calls might yield something of substance, he usually had an assistant check them out. In the past thirty years, only once or twice had there been anything worth pursuing. This time, Gabler’s assistant came back with a simple message inviting him to a private viewing of what the caller claimed was the most astounding discovery in human history. So Gabler agreed to see Cordiss in person and asked her to send his assistant some photographs and corroborating documents regarding the object she was preparing to sell.

Then Victor Lambert boarded a plane with fifteen thousand dollars in cash that he and Cordiss had borrowed from a loan shark and flew to Kansas City to meet Carrie Pittman, who had told Cordiss that she was willing to do business with the Historical Society.

19

“MR. VOEKLE WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU, MISS,” ROLAND GABLER’S slim, gray-haired butler told Cordiss Krinkle before he withdrew down a side hallway.

Cordiss stood in the entrance hall of Gabler’s Park Avenue apartment. She had never been in the presence of so much wealth. The marble floor under her feet was buffed to a polish so high that it threw back reflections of Gabler’s beautiful antique furnishings—elegant French tables, ornate benches, magnificent tapestries, paintings Cordiss had seen only in books. Cordiss felt awestruck and out of place until she remembered something she’d read in a recent copy of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine. “Things are always as they should be when money has